Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Changes and Contradictions

Naomi Sakr

My aim here – Naomi Sakr writes – is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists.

This paper was presented by the author at the Conference “The East and the West: Women in the eyes of the media”, organised by Resetdoc and held in Doha on April 19th 2009. It is based on the author’s much longer research article, ‘Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric, Reductionism and Realities’, published in the December 2008 issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 35, No 3, pp 385-404.

The government of Saudi Arabia has introduced numerous internal economic and political reforms in recent years. Any account of these reforms should acknowledge that they started in the 1990s and therefore predated both the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the international pressure that the attacks triggered for Saudi Arabia to initiate social reforms. Although the changes discussed in this article took place in 2004-06, it is important to understand them in the context of a much longer history of change – one that goes back several decades. Since the focus here is on media, there may be no call to look back much further than the start of television in the kingdom in the 1960s. But, since the focus is also on women, it is relevant to note that Saudi Arabia signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 2000. The government placed multiple reservations on its adherence to the convention. The crucial factor, however, is that it signed the convention for reasons that seemed to be related to a bid for increased foreign investment and membership of the World Trade Organization and had nothing to do with external pressures experienced in the wake of 9/11.

It is also necessary to recognize that Saudi Arabian public discourse on the issue of women's status is full of contradictions. On one hand official rhetoric talks of 'women's nature' as if this 'nature' imposes self-explanatory restrictions on what women may do and where they may go. On the other, there have been some big changes in government policies on women's education, employment and legal standing. Professions and university courses that were once barred to women have been opened up. Women have been authorized to apply for identity cards without a male guardian's consent. In 2005, they were promised the vote in municipal elections that were due to take place in 2009 but were postponed. Contradictions are interesting because they indicate that there is intrinsic pressure for renegotiation. Several scholars have picked up on this point, showing how the contradictions between official discourse about women and practical realities have direct ramifications for Saudi women in their everyday lives. An extreme example was the fire at a girls’ school in Makkah in 2002. Fifteen girls died in that fire. Families of the victims blamed the religious police for obstructing evacuation because of rules about contact with uncovered females. After the deaths, responsibility for girls' education was transferred from religious clerics to the Ministry of Education.

My aim here is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists. This contradiction can help to account for pressures to renegotiate the status of female journalists. At the same time, the contradiction itself merits an explanation, which my presentation will attempt to give. However, before setting out the evidence, three background observations are in order. The first is that women’s visibility in the media does not necessarily tell us much about their status in other areas of public life. For example, Egypt - despite having a large number of female presenters in radio and television - has very few women in parliament.

The second is that public discourse in Saudi Arabia is based almost exclusively on references to Islam and such references are inevitably historically specific. That is to say: people in power interpret Islam differently in different times and places. For instance, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran reversed his position on women’s political rights. In 1962 he said it was against Islam for women to vote. In 1979 he said Muslim women had a duty to intervene in politics. Saudi Arabia has also seen revisions. In 1979 protestors laid siege to the Grand Mosque in Makkah, alleging moral degeneracy among the kingdom’s political leaders. The government responded with what Saudi women media veterans describe as a wave of ‘anti-women’ activity, which included removing women from many types of television programme and enforcing strict segregation in public places. This reaction conformed to what often occurs when certain interest groups need to put on a show of unity. They do so by pressurising the less powerful to abide by norms legitimized by reference to ‘tradition’. In this case 'tradition' is equated with Islam. Yet, as the scholar Hannah Papanek has noted, so-called traditions may be concocted by the already powerful from their own particular visions of the past and hopes for future power.

The third background observation relates to ways of evaluating change in media portrayals of women. The question of how to approach such an evaluation may appear very challenging when portrayals are highly contradictory. The 2005 edition of the Arab Human Development Report, subtitled The Rise of Women in the Arab World, concluded that: 'Contradiction is the outstanding characteristic of images of Arab women in the media as in society itself'. Widely differing images of women appear across all types of programmes on Saudi-owned television channels, including MBC, Rotana, Al-Risalah and Al-Majd. Because meanings are not fixed, no-one really knows how individual viewers interpret the diverse portrayals they see in the media. On the other hand, the more diverse the portrayals, the more scope there is for diverse interpretations. This implies that, instead of trying to evaluate portrayals in terms of whether they are ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ women, they can be evaluated in terms of the extent of diversity. When the diversity of characters and narratives increases, in both factual and fictional media content, the range of reference points also increases for discussion of issues relating to women’s status.

Moving now to evidence of women’s visibility in Saudi media over the period 2004-06, the choice of this three-year period is corroborated by an article published in the Saudi liberal online publication Elaph in June 2006. The author of that article declared that there had been a huge transformation of the Saudi media in the past two years. He wrote: ‘women are now appearing daily on the front pages of all eight official newspapers which had previously been monopolized by men’ and ‘official television channels, which had once minimized the presence of women in newscasts and other programmes have been turned into advocates for an invasion (iqtiham) of the media by Saudi women'. For many Saudis, the logical response to this alleged “transformation” was to point out that it was only a transformation in relation to the preceding quarter of a century. A comparison with the situation before 1979 might not have been so startling. For example, in the 1970s people used to watch open-air cinema in Saudi Arabia in mixed company. After the end of the 1970s they could not.

Source: ResetDoc, Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Changes and Contradictions