
Some Saudi women are secretly deserting their country - protomyth
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21718871-women-are-fed-up-being-treated-children-some-saudi-women-are-secretly
======
kchoudhu
My wife teaches in a coed university in the region. Her female students are
without fail more industrious than their male counterparts (who are generally
guaranteed government sinecures). The women, many of who have children at
home, are motivated to educate themselves, work hard once they have jobs, and
ultimately realize that anything that they want, they have to do for
themselves.

These countries are not risking only losing their women; if they do not mend
their ways, they will lose the most productive half of their populations.

~~~
true_religion
> they will lose the most productive half of their populations.

You cannot simply call one gender the most productive half of the population
as if the attribute is _inherent_ to their gender. It is not right.

~~~
namlem
Parent never implied that it was inherent. That was all you.

~~~
true_religion
I didn't mean to imply that they directly said that.

It's simply that they took an anecdote and came to a _really_ general
conclusion about how good one gender was.

They were talking 'as if it were inherent', as if when things were liberalised
women would still be more productive than men in that particular class.

Is it true?

Probably not since any greater achievement is due to that women currently
_must_ work harder simply to be seen as equal. If the social situation is
normalised, women won't simply work harder than men because they are "the
productive half of the population".

~~~
beaconstudios
no they really didn't. The GP explained why Saudi women are more productive,
and that it was a product of political circumstance. If the majority of men in
a country are effectively on state-sponsored welfare then describing women as
the "productive half of the population" isn't gender biased. It's describing
the situation.

------
applefarmer
I personally don't believe the US or any major corporation should deal with
countries that deny human rights like this without having some ongoing process
of reform. This is only tangentially related but are any of these chauffeurs
who drive Saudi women Uber drivers? If so, that's kind of an astonishing
circumstance.

"In 2002, The Economist magazine estimated that the salaries of the
approximately 500,000 chauffeurs driving women in Saudi Arabia came to 1% of
the national income."

------
xherberta
Key point: women in Saudi Arabia are subject to male guardians who control
whether they are allowed to "travel, work or study abroad, receive hospital
treatment or an ID card, or even leave prison once a sentence is served."

Iman, a hospital administrator, has her 17-year-old brother for a guardian. He
pockets her earnings and spends them on drugs and massage parlors.

 _When she hears other women say that their brothers don’t beat them, Iman
assumes they are lying “because they are scared of social housing [a jail-like
place where women can seek refuge from domestic violence]”._ <whoa>

------
jimmywanger
This will be very interesting. You can't put toothpaste back in the tube, and
once these women realize what is possible, many of them will want the
freedoms.

What'll probably happen is the government/authority will crack down harder and
be even more restrictive, leading to a vicious cycle where women who might
have put up with some restrictions will rebel entirely.

~~~
xherberta
Agreed. Yet, there will be prices to pay.

 _Last December the courts sentenced a man caught denouncing the wilaya
[guardianship rules] on social media to a year in jail. Another Saudi study,
at a university in Mecca, acknowledged that some runaways might be fleeing
physical abuse, but said that most had been influenced by the “misuse of
social media, copying other cultures and weak beliefs”._

------
aerique
So, while sounding like a creep, one could help these women by marrying them
and having them come over?

I don't understand the Australian honeymoon the article is talking about.

~~~
xyzzy4
You can also get a fiancé visa and marry in the United States.

------
Pica_soO
Could a woman in saudi arabia have a western worklife if working remote? Are
they allowed to enter contracts, without consulting a male relative?

~~~
xherberta
No. Male relatives have control over whether and where they can work. It even
sounded as though it's the male relatives who complete the job applications
for the women, and often come to the job interviews.

------
libeclipse
How do you bypass the economist's pay wall? Googling it doesn't seem to work.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I wish HN would shun pay wall sites, even if there's a workaround available.
It's clear they don't want you reading their stuff unless you're a subscriber,
respect their wishes.

~~~
jmts
I've been pondering a self-imposed boycott of websites with paywalls, and ads
that interrupt user experience. As time goes on I am valuing my time more and
more, and that five second delay mid-read (that costs me another ten to find
where I was up to) when I move my cursor off the current window and end up
with a pop-up, or some ad mid-article that disappears half-way resulting in a
quarter screen shift in content is becoming increasingly frustrating.

Of course the flip-side is coming up with a better way. I haven't yet thought
of anything glaringly obvious, but surely it involves making people happy, and
not pestering them and treating them as just another set of eyes.

~~~
jasonkostempski
"I've been pondering a self-imposed boycott of websites with paywalls, and ads
that interrupt user experience."

I made an FF add-on for myself for that exact purpose, here's a comment thread
about it from the other day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13949693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13949693)

