A Saudi woman shops at a mall with her children in Jeddah March 8, 2009. Some Saudi women are pressing the government to allow retail shops to hire female sales clerks to sell women's lingerie. (Susan Baaghil/Reuters)

By your shoe size, ma'am, I'd judge you a C-cup

Why, despite a head-to-toe coverage rule, Saudi women must still buy their underwear from a man.

By Caryle Murphy - GlobalPost
Published: March 16, 2009 07:25 ET
Updated: March 18, 2009 07:57 ET

RIYADH — Reem Asaad finds it annoying to buy her bras and panties from a man. But she doesn’t have much choice in the matter.

Although Saudi Arabia has the strictest gender segregation in the world, only men are hired as sales staff in most retail stores.

“We have men selling g-strings in stores to women which doesn’t happen anywhere in the world,” said Asaad.

But the 37-year-old professor of finance and banking is even more frustrated that a three-year-old regulation permitting female sales clerks has not been implemented.

For now, that regulation is languishing in the proverbial bureaucratic bottom drawer, a vivid example of the barriers to women in the workplace put in place by an ultraconservative religious establishment opposed to women working outside the home.

Asaad has launched what she calls “a consumer protection campaign” to force Saudi retailers to follow the regulation, but is facing an uphill battle.

“The religious establishment is against the empowerment of women, period,” adds Asaad. “They would like to limit them from taking care of their own finances.”

The lingerie saga began in 2006 with regulation #120 from the Ministry of Labor stating that only female sales clerks should be employed in stores selling women’s products.

The ministry thought they could kill three birds with one stone. The change would help the ministry’s efforts to provide jobs for Saudi women. It would give women a more comfortable consumer experience. And since women would be selling to women, it would reduce the “mingling” of genders that religious leaders reject.

But things are not always that easy in Saudi Arabia and the fine print of the regulation was telling: In order to overcome the concerns of conservative religious folk, the regulation required physical restrictions at stores designed to shield the presence of women staff from the shopping public.

For example, lingerie stores with female clerks had to have partitions around them so men could not see inside. They had to be locked from the inside. And men, who now accompany their wives or sisters into lingerie stores, would not be allowed to enter.

For retailers, the restrictions were profit-killers.

Not only would partitions be costly to build, but also they would defeat the purpose of having windows: to entice shoppers into stores.

Comments:

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Posted by Bob Giles on April 10, 2009 10:21 ET

The headline on this interesting and well-reported story is inappropriate. It is culturally insensitive, conveys little nuance and incorrectly implies a direct quote. The headline falls short of capturing the nature of just how offensive it is for Saudi women to have only male salesclerks in the lingerie department. I shared my concern with a colleague who is Muslim and a journalist in the Middle East. She described the headline as “borderline tabloid."

Bob Giles
Curator
Nieman Foundation for Journalism

Posted by Barbara on April 11, 2009 11:44 ET

Thank you, Bob, for your comment and for engaging with GlobalPost. We appreciate your concerns and wanted to reply to them publicly.

We thought this headline, written by an editor at GlobalPost, was appropriate because it communicates to readers in one short phrase the essence of this story: It is insulting to women to have to buy their lingerie from a man because they are not allowed to work. The headline does that by alluding to the practical reality of a lingerie store staffed only by men — they would not be able to take the measurements needed to properly fit lingerie. I also appreciate that the headline shows how awkward the situation must be for both genders, something Caryle's story is careful to point out.

It is not a direct quote, but since we did not use the conventions indicating it is a direct quote (either double- or single-quotation marks, or preceding the headline with "Saudi men:"), I thought that was apparent. The direct quote we could have used as a headline would have been tawdry: "Sir, I need a push-up."

I don't believe I will be able to change your mind about finding this comment offensive, but I hope I have provided a different perspective. Publishing a website about the world, and wishing to cover sensitive social and cultural issues, we inevitably will make some mistakes. Thank you for making us consider this headline again and think about why or why not it is acceptable. I am reluctant to change the headline because I believe this is the place on our website for readers to express their views and take us to task, and have a dialogue. We cannot revise what we have published simply because someone disagrees with what we have done; we would be second-guessing our work constantly, especially as the site’s audience grows and more readers begin to comment.

Our policy is to correct factual errors in a transparent way — not just to make the change but to note in an editor's note that it has been changed. Our policy for comments is to allow readers to criticize our work, as long as they do not use obscenities, hate speech, or slander. We hope these policies will keep our dialogue with readers open and informative for our ongoing work.

Thank you for joining us in this dialogue.

Barbara E. Martinez
Managing Editor, GlobalPost.com

Posted by annie on October 28, 2009 04:07 ET

Its really true we have to ask for lady shopkipers to manage its some time hard to explain what type of brasier we need?

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