In recent years, Saudi Arabia has implemented major changes to its gender and labor policies, rearticulating the role of Saudi women and migrant workers in the economy. Women’s empowerment is at the heart of the Saudi state’s post-Vision 2030 narrative, the government’s strategic blueprint for social and economic development, designed to diversify the economy and reduce dependence on oil. The Vision’s success depends on increasing the number of Saudi citizens in the workforce and reducing reliance on migrant workers in various sectors. Because of this move toward “Saudization”, there has been a significant focus on redefining the role of Saudi women and realizing their untapped economic potential. Gone are the days when Saudi women were relegated to the domestic sphere, constructed as mothers and caretakers of the home and the nation. The ideal Saudi woman is now an active participant in the country’s economy.
The neoliberal state feminism that underpins Vision 2030 equates women’s empowerment with their potential as successful economic actors. The “free” Saudi woman is one who accumulates rights and opportunities that enable her to flourish within a capitalist market economy. Saudi women are now promised that, with the right level of ambition and the support of the state, they can be and do anything—as long as it bolsters the state’s image as a hub of progressive modernity and contributes to its economic growth. The state has invested heavily in promoting the achievements of particular Saudi women through advertising, making their leadership and participation in certain industries including science, technology, sports, and the arts hyper visible. The fact that many working Saudi women are employed in less lucrative jobs and earning relatively low wages is overshadowed.
To facilitate women’s participation in the workforce, the Saudi state has implemented various measures and legal reforms. It has opened many new job sectors for women including in the service industry, the legal sector, and the military. It also enacted labor law reforms, introducing protection from employment discrimination and other measures to make the private sector more attractive to Saudi citizens. Additionally, the state undertook reforms to improve women’s rights more broadly. These include granting women the right to drive, implementing anti-harassment laws, and reducing the scope of the Male Guardianship System (MGS), a framework of laws and policies that subject women to the control and authority of male relatives, to grant women more legal autonomy and independence. Together, these measures have allowed women to overcome major barriers that hindered their economic participation.
For this, the Saudi state has been globally celebrated, including by international institutions. And this is no surprise – the gender reforms announced by the state, and formulated with the help of consultancy firms, largely align with the United Nation’s women’s empowerment agenda, which adopts a liberal model of gender equality that works to include ambitious women within the existing capitalist order, leaving its structural inequalities intact. Importantly, although the state has made a major effort to portray these measures as purely top-down initiatives, human rights groups, international organisations, and the media have also acknowledged the role that Saudi women themselves have played in advocating for these changes over decades, particularly their campaigns against the ban on driving and the MGS.
What is obvious from these celebratory accounts is that gender reforms in Saudi Arabia are almost always discussed only in relation to Saudi women, rendering their implications for non-citizens invisible. While improving the rights and status of Saudi women is certainly necessary, the empowerment of Saudi women as visible economic actors is linked to the reconfiguration of the country’s labor regime and has exclusionary effects on the migrant working class, in particular. Moreover, the limited accounts of Saudi women’s activism do not address how Saudi women themselves continue to participate in the exploitation of migrant workers, particularly through the Kafala framework, a set of laws and policies that regulates the ability of non-citizens to work and reside in the country.
An uncritical celebration of Saudi Arabia’s women empowerment agenda overlooks how rights gains for some Saudi women, and their increased inclusion in the workforce, may produce and entrench other forms of marginalization and exclusion, which particularly affect migrant workers. It ignores the limits of adopting gender reform policies that do not extend protections to all women and workers and fails to account for the impact they might have on a global scale, especially in the global south. This calls for a broader reflection on what emancipatory possibilities are foreclosed by liberal feminist justice frameworks that seek autonomy and equality for some, within unequal structures, rather than more meaningful forms of transnational solidarity that work to dismantle those structures.
State Feminism and Its Discontents
The state’s promotion of a liberal discourse of gender equality draws on a colonial Orientalist logic that presents the Arab state as the primary agent for progress and development, whilst constructing “society” as a homogenous block that remains traditional (read backward) and resistant to progressive change. To consolidate this state-society distinction, state officials have tried to portray governmental reforms, particularly around women’s rights, as entirely top-down initiatives bestowed upon society for its own benefit. For example, in 2018, the government invested heavily (£1m) in an international marketing campaign which included large posters displayed around London containing the hashtag #ANewSaudiArabia and the words “He [the Crown Prince] is bringing change to Saudi Arabia.” It also adopted repressive measures to further conceal the role that civil society actors and women’s rights activists had played in demanding these reforms, and to deter them from demanding more. Upon lifting the ban on driving and reducing the scope of the MGS, for example, the government targeted women who had been involved in campaigns challenging those restrictions for decades prior. To this day, some of the women and men who had been advocating for change from below remain imprisoned or under travel bans.
The idea of Saudi women as passive victims must be and has been challenged, but this is not enough. It is necessary to go further and reflect on how Saudi women have bought into state feminism and contributed to the reproduction of unequal social relations. In other work, I have analysed different modes of Saudi women’s activism to show how, like other Gulf feminisms discussed by Kareem (2016), it has largely followed a liberal model of feminism that remains constrained within, and reproduces, the bounds set by the state. Saudi feminism, too, has advocated mainly for the “Woman citizen,” “searching for an ‘equality’ that includes only her [the Saudi woman].” In campaigning for rights, autonomy, and economic independence, Saudi women have appealed to the state and its carceral impulse as the ultimate protector from “social” harms and violence. They have invoked a rights-based discourse that predicates access to rights upon citizenship, reproducing citizen/non-citizen hierarchies, through which unequal class relations are deeply constituted in the Gulf.
Saudi women’s rights activists have also conflated the interests of a narrow group of relatively privileged women with a singular category of “Saudi woman.” In their petitions for reform, for example, I have shown how, in claiming rights on behalf of the ‘Saudi woman” who seeks autonomy, independence, and economic success, they have sought to improve the lives of elite and middle class Saudi women at the expense of working-class people and migrant workers in particular. Several petitions relied on racialized tropes about migrant others, constructing male domestic workers as sexual predators from whom Saudi women required state protection. In addition to reproducing notions of the racialized other as irredeemably violent and criminal, and of Saudi women as disempowered victims in need of saving, they entirely overlooked the harms migrants, both women and men, are subjected to on an individual and structural basis, including at the hands of Saudi women. For example, what is notably absent from Saudi women’s campaigns to enter the workforce is a recognition of the domestic care gap that may grow as more Saudi women enter the workforce, and be filled, in many instances, by working-class migrant women whose lives and bodies are pervasively constrained by the Kafala system and its intertwined structure of labor exploitation and immigration control. That the empowerment of some women depends on the exploitation of others is overlooked.
A Changing Labor Landscape
One of the main goals of Vision 2030 is to increase the number of Saudi citizens, including women, in the workforce. While Saudi Arabia will continue to rely on migrant workers in particular industries, such as construction, this is an important shift because like other Gulf states, Saudi Arabia has heavily relied on foreign labor following its discovery of oil in the 1930s. The 1950s and 1960s saw the Gulf states shaken by strikes led by oil workers who demanded an end to the exploitative work and living conditions in the work camps of British and US oil companies. Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf monarchies, responded to these strikes with severe political repression as well as by instituting what Hanieh (125) describes as “a distinctive form of labour relations as a means of ensuring subordination,” widely known today as the Kafala system.
The Kafala system is not unique to Saudi Arabia and is not conceptually different from other immigration policies around the world. Broadly, it exists as a racialized labor regime grounded in the unequal global distribution of resources that has effectively transformed parts of the global south into cheap labor reserves. However, its regulations and entanglements with specific racialized and gendered particularities in different contexts shape its contours in Saudi Arabia. The state’s formalization of a tiered labor regime guarantees a division between Saudi and non-Saudi workers, giving the former better working conditions and benefits. This consolidated Saudi Arabia’s reliance on temporary migrant labor, which, in 2013, constituted around 89% of the private sector workforce.
In effect, the Kafala system has created a cheap, deportable, and highly precarious and exploitable migrant working class. It ties the worker’s visa and legal residence in Saudi Arabia to a particular Saudi sponsor for a limited duration, giving Saudi citizens and companies excessive control over the migrant working class. Workers are recruited through private agencies at high fees and are often also made to pay for their own visas. Once they arrive in the country, the nature of their work is often different and lower paid than promised. In many cases, their passports are also confiscated, making their ability to change work or leave the country nearly impossible. While Saudi Arabia announced that it has eased restrictions on migrant workers, including granting them the ability to switch jobs and to travel without “exit authorisations,” the structure of the system remains intact.
The Kafala system, which works through a combination of high immigration control and low labour protection, was intended to ensure the compliance of migrant workers and quell the possibility of unionizing and other forms of dissent, as they could be easily deported upon any minor violation of their contract. The nature of the system and the stark power imbalance it entrenches between Saudi citizens and migrant workers has led to high levels of exploitation and abuse of various forms, particularly of domestic workers, especially women, who are very isolated, making them an easier target that is more difficult to detect. This is also true of undocumented workers who may have either escaped exploitative or abusive working conditions or who remain for other reasons after the end of their contract and lawful residence. In October 2023, the state passed a new law (in force from September 2024) to improve protections offered to domestic workers, such as prohibiting the confiscation of passports and establishing maximum working hours. However, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms appear weak, which has raised doubts about its effective implementation.
Since its inception, the Kafala system has allowed for a visible division in the categories of work that different groups occupied. Saudi citizens (mostly men) worked in the public sector while migrant workers, many of whom are from global South countries that had been severely impoverished through colonial rule and by post-1970s neoliberal policies, were ultimately pushed into the private sector. Therein, they were given little workplace protections, no real restriction on working hours, and no minimum wage, making it highly unattractive to most Saudi citizens. Saudi women, on the other hand, were largely relegated to the home, tasked with domestic social reproduction duties, with the help of female domestic workers for those who could afford it. All of this was facilitated by oil wealth, which allowed the state to subsidize goods and services, making it possible for many Saudi families to live more comfortably on one income. In recent years, the declared move to reduce reliance on oil appears to have made this political economic model untenable, leading the state to shift its accumulation strategy and attract more Saudi citizens to work in the private sector.
To do so, the government has made several changes. It sought to make the private sector more attractive by pushing businesses to increase wages and by enforcing new labor standards. It also revived King Abdallah’s Nitaqaat program, initially announced in 2011 and designed to deliver “Saudization” by incentivizing private companies to hire more Saudis and penalizing those with low rates of Saudi workers. Finally, the state turned to Saudi women, a significant labor power reserve. This has led to a reduction in Saudi women’s unemployment rates. Between 2017 and 2023, women’s labor participation rose from 20.2-34.5 percent, a much-celebrated achievement of Vision 2030.
Based on preliminary qualitative research I have done, including questionnaires and informal interviews, there is an emerging link between increasing the number of working Saudi women and its effects on the lives and livelihoods of migrant workers and their communities. Although more research, including quantitative, is needed to offer a more comprehensive analysis, it appears that several of the jobs Saudi women are now working in, particularly customer-facing roles, were previously largely occupied by male migrant workers. One important reason for the previous lack of Saudi women in these roles is, as Le Renard (2013) shows, that the previous rules around gender segregation in public spaces excluded Saudi women from most jobs where they would interact with men. As Saudi women enter mixed-gender work environments, they compete with men for the same jobs. In some industries that were previously largely occupied by male migrant workers, such as retail and hospitality, this has led to Saudi women replacing them.
Given the structural constraints of the Kafala system, the unemployment of migrant workers may have far reaching effects, including deportation. Many migrant workers have lived in Saudi Arabia for decades and would have to re-build entire lives and communities in “home” countries that they may no longer have links to. Children of migrant workers who were born in Saudi Arabia may never have had a connection to those places at all. Moreover, this may further impoverish communities in their home countries who rely on remittance flows. Some may need to stay illegally, in constant hiding from state authority, losing access to healthcare and other protections or services, while risking deportation, detention, and being forced to pay fines and fees. This would push them into an ever-growing informal work sector, where labor is even cheaper, and where exploitation and abuse are heightened.
Beyond Dis/Empowerment
Celebratory accounts of Saudi women’s empowerment have portrayed the changes as overwhelmingly positive. The state has equated women’s empowerment through economic independence with the overall prosperity of the nation. Women’s rights activists have reinforced this neoliberal narrative in their own campaigns for reform. In these accounts, the nation becomes a place made by and for citizens who bear the responsibility for their own flourishing and for that of the nation. The state’s role becomes a remover of obstacles to economic success under capitalism. The overrepresentation of migrant workers in certain industries and societal patriarchal control become barriers to be taken down by the state’s ever-growing carceral arm. In these accounts, the costs of liberal gender equality agendas, for non-citizens and for working class communities, are effaced. This raises serious questions about the limits of women’s empowerment, who it can serve, and who it harms. What Saudi women have achieved through increased access to the workforce is not liberation. Rather, they have been allowed to participate more visibly in a system that is predicated on gendered, racialised, and class-based oppression and exploitation.
While Vision 2030 is leading to a reconfiguration of the role of Saudi women and migrant workers in the workforce, that Saudi women play an important role in the exploitation of migrant workers is not new and has always been built into the Kafala system. The women’s empowerment narrative only presents Saudi women as victims in need of saving or empowerment by the state, obfuscating how Saudi women themselves have participated in the exploitation of others. This highlights the importance of interrogating liberal gender reforms, which only benefit a small portion of Saudi women rather than transform the social relations that subordinate women and workers to different degrees.
Despite its claims to benefit the nation, women’s empowerment as it is promoted by the state and celebrated globally, will continue to benefit only a portion of privileged Saudi women who align with the state’s Vision, while reproducing the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression of migrant workers. Saudi women need to move beyond liberal feminism’s model of seeking more visibility and access within neoliberal state and private structures. This means that rather than limiting campaigns to “women’s rights,” they must organize for fair and equal working conditions for all, regardless of nationality, and against the institution of citizenship through which class is so heavily constituted in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf.
Fair and equal treatment of migrant workers is a feminist issue. There is a lesson in this for all who seek liberation rather than selective empowerment: to think more expansively about forging local and transnational solidarities that interrogate and work to dismantle the unequal social relations through which the Kafala system and other forms of exploitation are sustained.
[Thank you to the editors at Jadaliyya for their time and feedback. A special thanks to Francesco Amoruso, Mira Al-Hussein, Robert Knox, Adam Hanieh, and Jamal Abu-Eisheh for comments on early drafts. Thanks also to Idil Akinci-Perez for creating a space for me to think through this with brilliant women scholars on/of the Gulf.]