The NYT published an interesting piece today about Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor who is an economist and an expert on working women. The article discusses her trip to Saudi Arabia which was “part of an effort by a group of star academics who have taken on a project with the Saudi government aimed at helping women there overcome hurdles that prevent them from getting jobs.”
She went from the US, “with one of the highest rates of working women,” to Saudi Arabia, “a nation with one of the lowest.” As she noted: “It’s almost this stereotype of the way we were. It’s even more than that — because it’s the way we were, on steroids, with a lot of luxury goods. It’s an extreme version.”
As the article points out, Saudi Arabia is “one of the wealthiest countries in the Gulf region” but “[a]t the same time, the Muslim nation is socially conservative, with rigid cultural attitudes and restrictions on women that include preventing them from driving.”