Glowork employment conference for women held in Jeddah Riyadh – Arabstoday Young Saudi Arabian women rallied at an employment conference on Thursday to express their desire to establish a promising future for women in the jobs market.The conference, entitled A step forward, was organised by Glowork Institution in the city of Jeddah and was attended by 300 Saudi women and girls from different universities.The current efforts exerted by the Saudi leadership to support the role of women aims to move forward and loosen the restrictions imposed on them by the ultra-conservative Kingdom for decades. Saudi King Abdullah has implemented a number of reforms to ensure the rights of women to vote and to run for the elections in addition to participating in the Saudi parliament are upheld.The conference provided the Saudi female students with the opportunity to hear advice from a number of government representatives and officials from the private sector.The event is considered as another positive step taken by the Kingdom to alleviate women and develop their rights. Ibrahim al-Meiqal, official spokesman of the Saudi Ministry of Labour, stressed that the ministry continues to work to create a suitable atmosphere to ensure the active participation of women in Saudi society and allow them to contribute to the development of the country.He added that the Saudi private sector appointed 160,000 women in the last 2 years following new legislation, while only 70,000 women had been employed 30 years before the changes were made.Head of Glowork Khaled Elkhodeir asserted that a wide gap between the education sector and the labour market exists in Saudi Arabia, adding that Saudi graduates are unaware of the skills they need to enter the job’s market, especially the private sector.The statistics recovered by Glowork show that women faced serious challenges in the past, due to social restrictions, such as needing to seek permission from a male-guardian for any decision. The research noted that changes have since occurred in Saudi society, which have allowed women to overcome these challenges and brought them closer to finding employment.
Source: Agencies