Saudi has 1.6m jobless women They include 78 doctors and over 385,000 university graduates

Nearly 1.6 million Saudi woman are jobless and almost a quarter of them are doctors and other holders of university degrees, a senior Saudi labour official was reported on Saturday as saying.

Following royal orders to find jobs for Saudis, the Ministry of Labour has received applications from around 1.6 million Saudi women from all parts of the Gulf Kingdom, the world’s oil powerhouse.

The applicants include 78 doctors, 2,250 holders of masters degrees, 11,000 high diploma graduates and more than 385,000 holders of bachelor university degrees, the Ministry’s undersecretary Fahd Al Tukhaifi said.

“The remaining applicants include 74,000 diploma graduates and nearly 537,000 secondary school graduates,” he told a labour seminar in the western Red Sea port of Jeddah, according to local newspapers.



“The problem is aggravated by the low participation of Saudi women in the private sector as many companies are still reluctant to hire national women.”

Recent government data showed Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy, is

suffering from a high unemployment rate among the youth as more than 43 per cent of citizens aged between 20 and 24 years are unemployed.

The rate at the end of 2010 was higher than in the previous two years despite a drive by the country to find jobs for its fast-growing nationals and dispose of hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers who dominate the private sector.

The figures by the government statistics and information centre showed 43.2 per cent of the Saudi males and females aged 20-24 years were unemployed at the end of 2010, nearly 20 per cent above the 2008 rate.

“This comes at a time when nearly one million labour visas for foreign workers were issued in 2009,” the report said. “The private sector continued a drive to import foreign labour although nearly 111,000 Saudis were looking for jobs.”

Sitting atop over a fifth of the world’s recoverable oil deposits, Saudi Arabia is suffering more from unemployment than other Gulf hydrocarbon producers given its large population and the slowdown in its economy in some years. As the public sector has become redundant, the government has sought help from the private sector to create jobs for Saudis.

In mid 2010, Saudi Arabia’s population was put at around 27.1 million, including nearly 20 million Saudis.

The Kingdom last year launched its most aggressive job drive to force the private sector to employ more Saudis and officials expect the plan to yield at least 500,000 jobs for nationals within two years.