Saudi Female Lawyers To Fly Solo At Last

Ruth Pollard of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that four female lawyers are set to become the first women in Saudi Arabia to practice law in the country’s court, which marks another milestone for women’s rights in the notoriously conservative nation. Until now, female law graduates were only permitted to work as “legal consultants” – they could not represent clients in the court and were not considered lawyers. A social media campaign entitled “I am a female lawyer” was launched last year to bring light to the discriminatory system, as Saudi Arabian women protested that it was unfair that they could not practice law in their home country despite spending years studying law locally and abroad.

This article brings to attention a social issue that many regard as either diminishing in importance or already resolved. Gender inequality is a matter one does not normally have to confront in a democratic society such as Australia. Saudi Arabia however, remains an Islamic state headed by a monarchy, where the country and its government are governed by a King. With a system grounded upon long-established Islamic values, its citizens are therefore presented with different social challenges. This article in particular highlights the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. An examination of scholarly literature alternatively attempts to explain the ways of thinking that underpin and support the ideas of gender inequality.

Through her investigation of the ways in which the “social concepts of order, disorder, civic society and the citizen have been constructed historically as gender dualisms”, feminist political theorist Carol Pateman offers an understanding of the systems of associated male power over women (Arnot & Dillabough, 1999). From her analysis, societies generally accept the fact that men “exemplified the potential of humans to create a social order that is based on ‘rationality’ and ‘truth’. “ As such, male ‘rational’ thought and “male versions of political autonomy” are thus legitimized as the only foundations of a functioning social system. Women on the other side, were characterized with notions of ‘disorder’, and were portrayed as “psychologically unbalanced and therefore unable to articulate a political consciousness”. Women became symbols of emotion, natural feeling and caring for those related to them (Arnot & Dillabough, 1999). In relation to the right to receive a license to practice law, it would seem that the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Justice have likewise struggled to challenge perceptions of women as incapable of the “objectivity” and “principled behaviour” required in court.

In conclusion, cultural traditions such as Islamic values are not invariably the cause of women’s inequality. The ideas brought forward by Pateman demand us to challenge “the core of our understanding of citizenship and the civic sphere” (Arnot & Dillabough, 1999). Has society subconsciously legitimized the dominance of masculinity in our social and legal systems?