Women in Saudi Arabia: How has life changed?

Few groups of people have seen as much legal, social, and cultural change in the last decade as women in Saudi Arabia.

Needing to diversify its economy from oil, the Kingdom has embarked on the Saudi Vision 2030 program, which, alongside extensive changes to the law, has seen the religious patrols that enforced them be largely defanged. 

These changes have had a particularly profound impact on women, as the traditional system of male guardianship has been relaxed, granting them independence in a whole host of areas. The kind of female emancipation that took many countries centuries to achieve has happened in Saudi Arabia in less than a decade.

Saudi Arabia has been part of our Core research since 2011, giving us a front-row seat to track and observe these social changes in action. And they’re not just interesting to observe in their own terms - they also present quite fascinating questions about consumer behavior. If you have access to your own bank account for the first time, who do you bank with? If you can suddenly buy a car, what brand do you choose and why? If cinemas come to your country for the first time in over 30 years, how often do you go, and what films do you watch? 

In this blog, we share some of the key things we’ve learned about this historical change. 

1. Women in Saudi Arabia are moving into work

The most fundamental change is that more women are now in work, as increased female employment has been identified as one of the key levers to improve the Kingdom’s economy. In 2011, 4 in 10 Saudi women were unemployed - twice the level seen in Spain at the peak of its unemployment crisis in 2013. 

The figure for unemployment among Saudi women now stands at just 16% - still over double the global female average, but a rapid trend in such a short time. A good example of the progress made here is the first all-female flight crew that operated a service between Riyadh and Jeddah in 2022.  

2. New career sectors are opening up

Saudi women technically weren’t banned from working before. But their jobs were largely restricted to certain fields, mostly education and administrative roles within government, which tended to be gender-segregated. 

Those jobs are still popular, but in 2025 they’re now joined by the IT, finserv, and marketing industries as hotspots of female employment. Ironically, earlier gender-segregation practices accelerated women's entry into tech, as remote work allowed them to participate without in-person mixing. And their involvement in tech has been assisted by specific initiatives, such as Apple’s all-female developer academy - the first of its kind in the world.

3. Women in Saudi Arabia have more clout in the workplace

As well as entering the workplace, Saudi women are now achieving more seniority within it. 11% of them now have responsibility for general management within their job, compared to just 2% in 2011. In addition, 5% are company founders, and government figures indicate that 45% of small and medium enterprises in the Kingdom are now led by women. 

As more women move into senior roles or establish their own businesses, a multiplier effect emerges, where they foster networks and incubators to boost other female entrepreneurs.

4. Homeownership is on the rise 

Alongside workplace changes, Saudi women have experienced some profound changes at home. More Saudi women now actually own a house, with 59% now owning at least one property, compared to 44% in 2014. This has been helped by changes to property loan programs that supported women in purchasing property. 

Something we’re keeping an eye on in relation to property is single-women households. A landmark 2021 ruling established that Saudi women could live on their own without permission of a male guardian. While it’s still very low figures who do this (1.8%), that’s still a doubling since the law was passed and something we’re paying close attention to. 

5. Nearly every woman in Saudi Arabia now has a bank account

Saudi women now have greater freedom to work, but your salary means very little if you can’t safely receive and store it. In 2017, only half of Saudi women had a bank account, but now 9 in 10 do, meaning they’ve reached parity with the global female average - thanks largely to reforms to the guardianship system and the introduction of digital ID cards. 

6. Credit card use has shot up

Those reforms have had a similar impact on access to credit cards, and Saudi women now surpass the global average in credit card ownership - 8 in 10 now have one, a massive rise from just 3 in 10 in 2017.

7. Investing has gone mainstream

Financial independence isn’t just about spending, it’s also about being able to build up personal wealth. Here too we’ve seen some striking growth - whereas only half of Saudi women had at least one type of investment (whether gold, stocks, bonds, or something else) in 2014, three-quarters now do, with women more likely than men to have investments in gold or fine art. 

8. Driving has gone from an illegal activity to a regular pastime

Perhaps the most globally recognised change is that Saudi women can now legally obtain driving licenses.

Half of Saudi women now drive at least once a week, a huge growth that means they’re now actually more likely to do this than the global female average. 

So if there’s a new market of car drivers in the country, what do they want to drive? Compared to men in the country, they’re more likely to be in the market for a coupe or a convertible, and their most distinctive brands of choice are Jeep, Audi, and Skoda. 

9. Public transport trips are climbing 

Part of the reason why getting access to cars was so important for women in the country was that public transport in Saudi Arabia has historically been quite limited.

But this again has changed a great deal. Recent years have seen the opening of the Riyadh Metro, an expanded bus system, and more cross-country railway lines. 

Saudi women are now far more mobile, regularly using public transport, with a quarter using some form of public transport once a week, up from 14% a decade ago.

10. More Saudi Arabian women are now leading the grocery shop

All of these different trends - of women gaining more employment, financial independence, and mobility - have knock-on effects on their spending habits.

A great place to see this is who has responsibility for food shopping in a household. At a global level, women usually do this more than men - they typically control the household budget and have a big influence on what’s bought at the supermarket.

Historically, due to male guardianship norms, this was typically reversed in Saudi Arabia. In 2011, only 17% of women had the main responsibility for food shopping in their household, but this has since increased to 46%.

More women can drive to a grocery store, not have to worry about mingling with men, buy what they need with their own bank account and credit card, and have more freedom to buy what they want to buy. Saudi men still lead in making these kinds of shopping decisions overall, but the gap is narrower than ever. 

11. Dining out is gaining traction

This growing female spending isn’t limited to groceries - it extends into hospitality, where there are no longer laws enforcing the separation of men and women. The share who visit restaurants at least once a month has increased from 65% to 76% since 2016, while weekly fast food visits have gone up from 33% to 45%.

An interesting story happening alongside this is the growth of Saudi-owned fast food brands overseas, as the Vision 2030 initiative has encouraged native brands to expand abroad. In the UAE, a quarter of consumers now visit Albaik fried chicken restaurants, a huge growth from just 6% in 2019, and representing a challenge to the country’s current market leader, KFC. 

12. Saudis are now some of the world’s biggest cinema fans 

The other big headline move in Saudi Arabia is the legalization of cinema screenings, one which wasn’t technically a gender-specific move, but has big implications in practice.

The consequences of this are one of the most astonishing trends in our research. Remarkably, Saudi women now rank second among 54 markets for weekly cinema visits - unthinkable as recently as 2017, when cinemas didn’t even exist there. The behavior has been not just normalized but popularized in an incredibly small amount of time. 

Part of the reason why legalization of cinemas was so important in the country is because mothers are such an important market for certain genres of film. Compared to Saudi men, women are much more likely to prefer kids films, musicals, and drama. 

13. Snapchat has carved out a market in the Kingdom 

Saudi Arabia has witnessed the same similar explosion in social media seen across the world, but with unique local dynamics. 

8 in 10 Saudi women use Snapchat, putting them only behind Norwegian women on a global scale, and well above other Arabic markets like the UAE (52%) and Morocco (28%). 

Snapchat’s popularity shows that while many cultural changes have come around women’s role, many still hold. Its emphasis on privacy makes it popular in a region where reputation and honour are still valued, even if religious surveillance has been reduced. 

14. Traditional gender views are actually rebounding 

With all of this change compressed into such a short period of time, you’d assume that attitudes would naturally follow - as freedoms are granted, the appetite for more freedoms would grow even further.

In fact, the opposite has happened. 29% of Saudi women feel it’s important to maintain traditional gender roles, increasing from 21% in 2020. It’s a retrenchment of gender attitudes that the Arab Barometer has also observed in neighbouring countries. At present, Saudi Arabia stands out globally as one of few countries where women express more conservative gender-role views than men.

As David Commins has written in his recent history of the country:

“Not all women embraced the modernist agenda. Conservative women writers, many of them graduates of the religious universities, expressed support for preserving restrictions in the name of protecting women (from men) and resisting pressure from Western powers to abandon inherited ways. In their view, individual women’s safety and the integrity of an imagined national culture hinged on rejecting liberal norms.”

There are many ways to interpret this, but above all it’s a reminder to be humble. It’s very easy to assume a default model of inevitable modernization, but cultural change is frequently contested - as the sociologist Alice Evans puts it, culture isn’t a fossil, it’s a fist fight. When norms change in such a fast period of time, there’s often a backlash. The future of the country might be more complicated than many of us think. 

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Figures in this blog are of female consumers who live in Saudi Arabia aged between 16 and 64 years old. While these are predominantly Saudi nationals, it does also include some expat populations, like Filipinos and Pakistanis, and other Middle Eastern nationals, like Yemenis and Egyptians.