Some Saudi women are secretly deserting their country | Hacker News Reader

Some Saudi women are secretly deserting their country

economist.com

106 pointsprotomyth42 comments

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.

> male counterparts (who are generally guaranteed government sinecures) > These countries risk not only of losing their women; if they do not mend their ways, they will lose the most productive half of their populations.

Sounds like they're also losing the potentials of many of their male population with such guaranteed government sinecures.

Yeah, there is definitely a motivation gap between the genders brought on by relative government subsidies.

One might speculate that the special extra support afforded to women versus men in technical careers these days might lead to a similar slackening off in effort over time..

There's a difference between "let's give women a leg up in an area they are underrepresented" and "let's stop treating women as chattel".

I think this is an important idea in the understanding of motivation.

That, and the perception of value in such industries. Telling people off all the time isn't a good way to regulate the market..

>Her female students are without fail more industrious than their male counterparts

Do you think that is the cause or the effect of SA's policies regarding women?

I would guess that's the effect. It's not as if women outperformed men to such an extent that all the men in Saudi Arabia conspired to oppress women; I'm quite certain that Wahhabist culture---"justified" by the Quran---is the root cause of the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia. That oppression forces women to have to work infinitely harder than men to achieve anything.

> 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.

You can read an article about Saudi Arabia and still have the most productive thing you can say is calling out anti-male bias. Congratulations on your commitment.

I'm not calling this out as an anti-male bias. I don't think the original poster is biased, misandrist, or anything of that nature.

They're just over generalising.

Women should be allowed to work because it is the right thing to do, because human freedom and equality is to be cherished axiomatically.

The argument that women should be allowed to work because they are "the most productive half of the population", is a non-starter----both not true, and distracting. Even if some subgroup is terribly unproductive, they should still be given equal treatment merely for being human. Productivity, intelligence, aptitude, etc. should have no bearing on what ought to be natural human rights.

Often something is bad for more than one reason.

He's right, though. There are two really questionable assumptions on the author's part - first, that women as a whole are more productive. Second, that they would still be more productive if they were equal to men under the law.

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

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".

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.

Actually the parent did, I think the reply is a legitimate criticism as the op also simply gave one anecdote then proceeded to strawman an entire populations gender.

Men are first in line for the very generous government teat, and thus naturally less likely to work than women. To get anything done, women therefore have to work harder and are therefore, in aggregate, more productive than their male counterparts.

Not everything need be refracted through the gender wars -- sometimes pure economics will do.

This is true, however it is a poor argument for normalising the rights of women. If women have equal social treatment, the incentive to work harder than men goes away, thus the proffered reason for allowing women equal treatment also goes away.

Women ought to have equal treatment not because of any perceived productivity benefits, but merely because gender discrimination is inherently wrong.

I am not fighting a gender war. I do not think the above poster was fighting a gender war. To be clear, I think everyone ought to be given the benefit of the doubt here.

I don't imagine that perceptions of women's worth in those parts of the world would have a chance to change if not for women standing up and chasing for their human rights. Just like in the western world, women are constantly (much to my dismay hehe) proving that they are capable of contributing to society in many of the same ways as men.

Simply aiming for equilibrium when a system is so horribly out of whack will not have the same impact as an aggressive flipping of the system on its head. However chaotic it may become...change is being made by those who want it badly enough.

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."

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>

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.

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”.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

"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

You can block all cookies on the website if you want a paywall bypass that works without needing incognito - an extension like uMatrix [1] does this persistently (click on the plugin icon when your browser is navigated to The Economist, then click on the bottom half of the "cookie" box in the "all" row. The column should turn red, indicating that cookies are blocked).

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

Incognito mode, and then google the article.

using incognito mode on firefox seems to work for me. I got a 'youve hit your 10 article limit' msg otherwise

Use a different browser worked for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com