Some Saudi women are secretly deserting their country

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21718871-women-are-fed-up-being-treated-children-some-saudi-women-are-secretly

by protomyth • 9 years ago

106 36 9 years ago

economist.com

libeclipse• 9 years ago

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

kchoudhu5• 9 years ago

Incognito mode, and then google the article.

nickez• 9 years ago

Use a different browser worked for me.

maskedinvader• 9 years ago

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

jasonkostempski2• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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.

ddinh• 9 years ago

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

kchoudhu5• 9 years ago

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.

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

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?

gragas• 9 years ago

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.

differentView• 9 years ago

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.

kchoudhu5• 9 years ago

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

true_religion4• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

kchoudhu5• 9 years ago

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.

moomin• 9 years ago

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.

aerique• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

applefarmer• 9 years ago

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."

Pica_soO• 9 years ago

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

xherberta3• 9 years ago

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.

jimmywanger• 9 years ago

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.

xherberta3• 9 years ago

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”.

xherberta3• 9 years ago

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>

Some Saudi women are secretly deserting their country

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