RIYADH // Are 100,000 female Saudi teachers victims of salary discrimination, or are they employees who freely signed job contracts and now must live with the financial consequences? This is the question at the heart of a debate in the kingdom that has been running for more than a year. And it is not an insignificant debate, since its outcome affects one of the most important sectors of the government's workforce: those training the next generation of Saudis.
"We are seeking equality with men in our financial rights," Mona Abdel Aziz, one of the activists campaigning to rectify what she and other teachers regard as unjust discrimination, said in an interview last week. The government acknowledges there are salary differences between these female teachers and their male counterparts and has taken some steps to close the gap. But it has not met all the teachers' demands, which would cost the government - at a minimum - 28 billion Saudi riyals (Dh27.4bn), according to Fahad al Tayash, the spokesman for the ministry of education.
"It's not an easy problem to solve," said Mr al Tayah, who also argued that the predicament of the 100,000 female teachers flows from their voluntary decision to accept employment under a special contract in force at the time they were hired. "A contract job ... is a totally mutual agreement," he said. "It's not mandatory [to sign the contract]." The dispute illustrates two trends in Saudi society. For one, it highlights the greater space for civic activism that has emerged under King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz.
As a result, more ordinary Saudis - both men and women - are speaking out for their social and economic rights. Ms Abdel Aziz and other teachers, for example, last year approached the king's car outside his Riyadh palace in order to speak with him. He rolled down his window to hear them out, she said. "This is the first time that we witnessed such a movement by Saudi women," said Maha al Shaikh, a healthcare development specialist and women's rights activist in Riyadh. "It's an example of a [new] level of awareness of Saudis" arising from "the movement led by the king to encourage women to be more [insistent on] her rights".
Ghanem Nuseibeh, a partner at Cornerstone Global Associates, a consultancy firm, said the open debate over women's pay shows that "it's no longer taboo to talk about equality". Regardless of how the issue is resolved, "the fact that they feel that they can talk about it ... proves that the reforms are moving in the right direction," added Mr Nuseibeh, who is also senior analyst with the Dubai-based think tank Political Capital. "I wouldn't have imagined that sort of thing to happen some years ago."
The teachers' campaign also points to the increasing competition likely to arise as more Saudi women enter the workplace. The government is working hard to create new jobs for both men and women in the country's huge youth population. But with women making up almost 60 per cent of this year's university graduates, their presence will have a major impact on the job market. Ms al Shaikh said that both she and her friend, Hasna al Qunayeer, a columnist for Al Watan newspaper, regard the teachers' campaign as the start of a larger movement by Saudi women to seek equal rights in such areas as divorce, child custody, and travelling outside the country on their own.
The current controversy is somewhat complicated, with origins in the 1990s when low oil prices had the government in bad economic straits, but needing to create jobs for hundreds of new university graduates. Instead of hiring men and women teachers as fully fledge civil servants, it launched a special contract programme to hire them at a flat annual fee with no annual raises. Most male teachers in the programme quickly moved into ministry employment. But there is less turnover among female teachers, so it took much longer for women in the contract programme to be absorbed by the ministry, according to Ms Abdel Aziz.
She spent six years as a contract teacher, and when she was transferred to ministry employment, she was not given credit towards her pension for those six years, and she was not placed in the pay grade she deserved as a university graduate, she said. As a result, her salary is lower than most of her male counterparts hired the same year, and even lower than some teachers hired many years after her, she added. She is getting 10,800 Saudi riyals (Dh10,577) a month, rather than the 14,200 riyals she calculates she should have. Consequently, her retirement pension will also be lower.
Ms Abdel Aziz said that while some men in the contract programme also had legitimate grievances, their financial losses were far less than the females'. "The difference in your salary is hundreds [of riyals] but the difference in my salary is thousands," she said. Like other female teachers, she rejects the ministry's argument that they entered the contract programme voluntarily because "in these days ... the only job available for Saudi women was teaching," she said. "My father would not allow me to go work in a hospital or any other ministry. Anyway, there were no jobs for women in other ministries." The pay discrepancies became more glaring after the female and male teachers' departments were merged in 2002, according to the ministry spokesman Mr al Tayash.
He said the ministry was trying "to come up with different solutions". For example, it has brought all teachers hired in the same year up to the highest pay grade available for that year. But to give the teachers all they are asking, "the cost is very high". Besides a one-time amount of 28 billion riyals to fund adjusted pensions, he said, the ministry would need to pay an additional 5 billion riyals annually in salaries until all the affected teachers retire.
In May last year, Ms Abdel Aziz and a group of about 25 men and women teachers waited to speak with King Abdullah outside his Yamamah Palace. She said he listened to their pleas through the open car window, accepted a file Ms Abdel Aziz had prepared, and said "Ebshro," which is closely approximated in English by "Consider it done." She said she would like to see him again because "I'm absolutely sure the king doesn't know that we are not having our rights".
cmurphy@thenational.ae
