Abstract
Following great success of the Saudi vision 2030 in increasing women participation in the labour market, this paper attempts to further investigate women employment in such a changing context. This timely study investigates how patterns of gender equality develop within three major sectors: multinational enterprises, semi-government organisations and state-owned companies. Drawing on institutional frameworks, the analysis and line with previous literature, highlights how societal traditions and misinterpretation of religious texts (in a Muslim majority country) can emerge and evolve as barriers for gender equality. Further, unintended consequences for equality policies could rather facilitate misinterpretations of how equality should be exercised. Particularly, this study underlines how the gendered employment experience is characterised by the sense of impermanence, triggered by the sense of gendered uncertainty vis-à-vis socio-institutional protection. We define the gendered experience of employment in this particular context as ‘the situation where such an experience, directly or indirectly, discourages the sense of permanence of employment and its advantages’. Saudi women, hindered by weak social networks, limited organisational options and the sense of temporary institutional protection, turn to create/rely on fragile personal networks for organisational protection as an alternative.
Utilising fifty in-depth interviews, the study benefited from an integrated approach of inductive and deductive analysis with the emphasis on methodological intersectionality. This is to capture the hitherto under-considered dimensions of gender and tribe alongside gender and nationality. This study comes to fill the gap in organisation studies literature, incorporating gender equality in the Saudi labour market, where the examination of the Saudi context lacks consideration of the unique socio-institutional characteristics.