The elusive definition of women’s work.

Saudi Arabia

Abeer Mishkhas

Arab View

It’s official: Women may work in any job that “suits their nature,” said Abeer Mishkhas in Riyadh’s Web-based Arab View. That, at least, is the promise of a new labor law, passed just last week. The problem is, nobody is quite sure what it means. Women already have “limited choices” for jobs in this country, of course. The most ambitious can choose only from teaching or medicine. Will their options now be curtailed even more, as certain fields are defined as being against the female “nature”? And what about men’s nature? In Saudi Arabia, “no woman would work as a construction worker” or a street cleaner. But—“and this is important—no Saudi man would either.” It seems, then, that we should define just what each sex’s nature is. “Maybe then we could start to understand what our men and women can and cannot do.” And who knows? “Maybe then men will give up certain jobs—and women will take them.”

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