Saudi Arabia's Gender Apartheid City

Saudi Arabia has taken its gender apartheid system to new heights with its plans to build an industrial city populated exclusively by female workers. The all-female municipality, which will begin construction in 2013, is expected to provide Saudi women work and career opportunities in a country that actively strives to separate them publicly from men.

To that end, the gender-specific metropolis, which is expected to generate 5,000 jobs, will house textile, pharmaceutical and food processing industries run by "female entrepreneurs" and staffed with all-women production lines.

As yet, it's still unclear how the all-female metropolitan labor force will arrive to work, given that Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that prohibits women from driving, prohibitions that include public lashings and prison sentences for offenders.

That being said, Saleh al-Rasheed, head of the Saudi Industrial Property Authority, which will oversee construction of the industrial city, expressed confidence that the future female employees would "demonstrate their efficiency in many light and clean industrial sectors that suit their interests, nature and capabilities."

Of course, determining a Saudi woman's professional interests and capabilities can prove problematic given the highly illogical, discriminatory and abusive lengths the Kingdom has gone to shutter women from societal participation.

That ill treatment manifests itself most visibly in the country's notorious gender-segregation laws, strictly enforced by the Kingdom's religious police, which require women in public to avoid all contact with men while draped in attire that conceals their entire body, save hands and eyes.

Moreover, compounding that troublesome issue, every woman in Saudi Arabia is required to have a male guardian -- usually a husband, father or even a son -- whose permission she must seek on issues ranging from what to wear, whether to work or study, whether or who to marry, or even whether to have surgery.

Not surprisingly then, being covered head-to-toe in a black robe, forbidden to interact with unrelated men and required to consult with a male guardian before making virtually any decision, makes finding employment a somewhat difficult proposition, which helps to explain why Saudi women constitute only 16.5 percent of the total national labor force.

So given all that, it comes as little surprise that the Saudi government would want to take its gender-apartheid system to its next logical step: building all-female industrial centers in which to further sequester women from societal view.

However, for its part, the Saudi government maintains that, evidence notwithstanding, it has been working tirelessly to level the gender playing field by creating numerous economic and political opportunities for Saudi women.

For example, Saudi officials point to their recent efforts to revolutionize the Kingdom's retail industry, efforts which they claim have created thousands of job openings for Saudi women. (...)