Women dominates Jeddah Economic Forum

So long marginalised in Saudi Arabia, women dominated Saturday's opening of the influential Jeddah Economic Forum, which heard a ringing call for change from the first female to deliver the keynote speech.
Lubna al-Olayan, chief executive officer of Olayan Financing and one of the conservative kingdom's top businesswomen, sent out an unveiled and hard-hitting message in her address entitled "A Saudi Vision for Growth".
"Abandon the progress without change philosophy," she urged the more than 1,000 delegates to what the organisers bill as the Middle East's leading think tank.
"Without real change there can be no real progress. If we in Saudi Arabia want to progress we have no choice but to embrace change," said al-Olayan as Riyadh grapples with demands for deep reform in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on the United States.
In a country where women are still banned from driving a car, the diminutive CEO of a group of some 40 companies had started by setting out a liberal vision of "mutual respect and tolerance" for all and jobs for women as well as men in the Islamic kingdom.
But she did not only target the government in demanding an end to red tape, educational reform, swift implementation of new legislation and easy visa processing.
"Make no mistake: it is no longer acceptable for the private sector to sit back and expect the government to effect change on its own," warned al-Olayan.
She listed key tasks for government and business working together, from defining skills needed for a 21st century workforce to establishing a meritocracy, creating jobs for women as well as men and social responsibility.
Pointing to 2003 as an exceptional year when Saudi gross domestic product (GDP) surged 6.4 percent and the stock market soared 75 percent, al-Olayan concluded that rapid change and accelerated growth was achievable.
She noted that her speech to the forum was itself a sign of "real progress and change."
"As a Saudi female I think today that we have made history, thank you Lubna," Nahed Taher, chief financial analyst at the National Commercial Bank, stood up to tell the three-day forum in this Red Sea City.
Woman after woman later took the microphone to praise al-Olayan and push female empowerment.
Taher told AFP that segregation had kept women at home but today there was the political will to accept them at work.
"The new thing is that we are now in the formal economy. We want to be there as professionals," she said.
"Rules and regulations need changing to enhance the role of women," who would bring "competition and completion to the efforts of the men."
This had to be "applied within our Islamic and Arab identity," she added.
At a panel session on "Women: the driving force for economic growth", Selwa Alhazza, head of Ophthalmology at King Faisal Specialist Hospital, said Saudi women were determined to do it their way, stressing the major strides made since schools for girls first opened in the 1960s.
"Show me another country where in one generation the mother is illiterate and the daughter is a professor, a consultant, a manager or a successful businesswoman," she said.
"We are a conservative country, we cherish our country, we will achieve it at our own pace ... we have done a lot in a short time."
Thuraya Arrayed, planning adviser to oil giant Aramco, offered statistics to back "the real need for a wider role for women", noting that only between 3.5 percent and five percent of women "actively participate" in the economy.
Every wage earner had six dependents in Saudi compared to fewer than three in Egypt, she said, predicting better living standards from greater female employment.