By Elizabeth Dickinson

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Zakia Attar strides through the racks of colorful abayas, running her hands along the fabric. She checks that the garments are perfectly arranged to attract customers and then proudly introduces her salesclerk, a fellow Saudi woman. Behind the carefully arranged shelves and the cash register in a small back office, Attar’s husband, Sulaiman Magboul, takes inventory and tallies up daily sales. A banker by profession, Magboul runs the financial side of Zakia Attar Designs.

Attar is a designer — one of a growing crop of young Saudi women seeking to add more flare to the traditional modest wear required of females here. She is no activist; Attar insists that women dress in a way that conceals their figures and says she enjoys a great deal about Saudi Arabia’s traditional gender roles. Nonetheless, her story shows how women in the workplace are changing the very social foundation of Saudi Arabia. Since she started her clothing line, it has become much more than just a source of income. Attar is also a wife and mother of four, and it’s those roles that have seen the biggest transformation since her boutique opened in 2012.

“This business is now my relationship with my husband,” Attar says. “He started respecting me: ‘My wife has value, she has talent, she is making me money.…’ Before it was just ‘my wife, the caregiver, the cook.’ Now it’s ‘my wife, my partner.’”

Not long ago, Attar’s story would have seemed impossible in Saudi Arabia. This is a country, after all, where until recently women had access to only a few professions, such as nursing and teaching. A series of reforms begun under former King Abdullah has changed all that, allowing females to take up a range of jobs, from sales to services to administration. As more and more professions have opened to women, female entrepreneurs and businesswomen like Attar have seized every opportunity, no matter how small.

Today, women can be found running shops and businesses, tech firms and start-ups. The number of female employees has grown 48 percent since just 2010, and the high female unemployment rate, at 33 percent, paradoxically shows that record numbers of Saudi women are trying to get out of the house and into the workplace.

These changes are turning Saudi Arabia’s traditional social structure on its head. Women legally remain dependents here: They require permission of a male guardian — a father, husband, or son — to travel and study. They can’t drive. But as they have started working, they have gained a newfound independence from the simple fact of having an income. It’s such financial power that could prove a game-changer for women’s rights in the kingdom.

The growing presence of working women is already reshaping the tradition of the Saudi marriage contract, a document drawn up by families ahead of an engagement. Marrying a working girl was once taboo; it showed her family didn’t have enough money to care for her. “For my husband, he had the idea that women should be at home,” says Fedhah Al Dosary, a mother of two and a computer programmer by trade who recently persuaded her husband and conservative in-laws to let her work.

Fearful of rocking the boat, she waited several years into her marriage to ask whether she could take on a job. “[My husband] thought, ‘She doesn’t need to work. I have a good job, so she doesn’t need to work.’”

Those views are changing, and today, many grooms’ families seek out bachelorettes with jobs. “It’s desirable now” to have a wife who works, says Khaled Al Maeena, former editor of the Saudi Gazette newspaper. “Two-income families are becoming the norm.” Indeed, in the first quarter of 2015, roughly 1.3 million of the nearly 1.9 million women employed in Saudi Arabia were married, according to the Ministry of Labor.

Brides’ fathers, meanwhile, increasingly demand that the right to study and work be explicitly guaranteed in the marriage contract, according to interviews with dozens of young women here. Specifying a woman’s rights at the time of engagement would prevent her husband from later preventing her from working or studying. Statistics back up this shift: 52 percent of university students are now women, many of them married.

Inside some marriages, too, the power dynamic has begun to shift. Attar has seen this happen firsthand: When she and Magboul married 14 years ago, she had just returned home from studying for seven years in Switzerland and the United States. She had a communications degree and every ambition to start a career, but found it difficult to secure a job in the media industry. Soon, responsibilities multiplied: There were four children and a home to care for.

Read more: Saudi Women Are Getting Down to Business

Source: FP