Banned from driving, Saudi women turn to Uber and other ride-share apps

Article from the May 7, 2015 Los Angeles Times by Alexandra Zavis, who is reporting from Riyadh. The story is pasted below and a link to the story is here.

When Hala Radwan returned to Saudi Arabia after obtaining a business degree in France, she was eager to put her new skills to use.
She found a job in the marketing department of a big international company. There was just one problem: How would she get to and from work in the only country that does not allow women to drive?
The mass transit options are notoriously poor. The cost of hiring a chauffeur was prohibitive. And she didn’t want to deal with the negative comments she would face if she tried to hail a cab in the conservative kingdom, where a woman using public transportation on her own is often seen as lacking morals.
“It was a nightmare,” she said.
Friends tipped her off to a solution: Uber and a regional competitor called Careem.
Smartphone-based ride services are becoming increasingly popular in Saudi Arabia’s major cities, especially among the large number of tech-savvy young people. Customers include foreign businessmen who don’t want to deal with the country’s sometimes chaotic taxi system. But more than 80% of individual users are women, the app companies say.
The apps have increased the mobility of and given a measure of independence to women who would otherwise have to rely on a male relative to ferry them around in the country which enforces a strict form of Islam. But with prices starting at about $5 a ride, even proponents concede it is not a solution for the poor.
Radwan, 29, spends nearly $700 a month on rides from Careem, with which she has a standing order to get to and from work.
The cost is slightly higher than for a taxi, but she finds the apps safer and more reliable. Both Uber and Careem use GPS technology to track their cars. With a few taps, she can see who will be driving her, the type of vehicle he uses and his customer ratings.
Better still, no one can tell she isn’t using a private car.
At least four ride-booking apps are available for download in Saudi Arabia, with more launches said to be in the works. The technology is the same as that used in the U.S. or Europe, but there are some notable differences in approach.
None of the companies work with drivers who use their personal cars to convey passengers at a fraction of the cost of a taxi or limousine service, a practice that has stirred conflict with transportation operators and regulators elsewhere. In Saudi Arabia, they say, they get their cars and drivers from licensed companies and charge comparable rates.
“We recognize that disruption is not the right model for this market,” said Careem’s founder, Mudassir Sheikha. “We’re trying to be good citizens and stay within the rules and offer a better quality of service.”
 His company, which is headquartered in the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, was one of the first to enter the Saudi market in summer 2013. It now has nearly 100,000 users in the kingdom, a figure growing at about 40% per month, he said.
The service is available in five cities, including the capital, Riyadh, and the commercial hub of Jidda. Other options include the cab-hailing apps Easy Taxi and Mondo Taxi.
San Francisco-based Uber, which operates in more than 300 cities in 56 countries around the world, entered the fray a year ago. In that time, the number of users has increased twentyfold, one of the fastest growth rates in the Middle East or Europe, said Majed Abukhater, who serves as the company’s regional general manager.
“A lot of Saudis have used Uber globally and were really excited to see it launched here,” he said. Limo and car rental companies also like the arrangement because they are getting more business, he said.
Late last year, the transportation committee of the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry said it was looking into the operations of several apps, which it accused of using drivers who were not authorized to carry customers in the kingdom – charges denied by Uber and Careem.
The companies say the response from government officials has been mostly positive. There were challenges getting started, however.
Many drivers needed training to provide the premium service touted by the apps. They weren’t used to opening doors for their passengers or helping them with luggage. Their cars weren’t well maintained, and punctuality was a problem.
“Drivers were not even wearing proper uniforms. They were wearing slippers,” Sheikha said. “So we ended up having to buy them uniforms. ... Then we had to start putting incentives in place for them to wear those uniforms.”
Although many Saudis own smartphones, credit card use is low. So Careem introduced a cash payment option. The company also operates a 24-hour call center, a reassuring feature for customers who may not be used to doing all their transactions online.
Customers say they appreciate the more professional and reliable service. There are few other transportation options, especially for women. Riyadh is building a metro system, but it is years from completion. Buses operate on limited routes and are mostly used by men.
“There are some [women] that take five to 10 trips with us every day,” Sheikha said. “We don’t see that kind of traffic anywhere.”
There is no law prohibiting women from driving in Saudi Arabia, but there are fatwas, or religious edicts issued by conservative Muslim clerics. As a result, the government won’t grant women licenses.
The effective ban, which is not enforced in other Muslim countries, is a product of the rigid segregation of the sexes in Saudi Arabia. Concerns have been raised here that allowing women to drive could put them into contact with male traffic officers, or in the case of an accident, male medics. One cleric even suggested that driving could harm a woman’s ovaries, a suggestion ridiculed by many Saudis on social media.
Female activists who have defied the ban, posting images of themselves behind the wheel on social media, have in some cases been arrested. Two women who were detained at the border when one of them attempted to drive from the United Arab Emirates into Saudi Arabia spent more than 70 days in custody before they were released in February.
Families with means will hire a chauffeur to take female members to work, to school, out shopping or to friends’ houses. But even that option has limitations.
“I have a driver, but sometimes he is too busy bringing my sisters from school,” said Gamar al-Douh, 24, who comes from a family of three girls with no brothers to help with the driving. “If I don’t have someone to take me, I use Uber.”
Radwan and her husband considered a chauffeur, but decided against it. The couple got married two years ago and are trying to save money to buy a house and raise a family.
Monthly salaries for a driver start around $400, but can be twice as high if the person is experienced and pays for his own accommodation.
Few Saudis are willing to do the work, so families typically face the additional expense of sponsoring a foreign driver for a work permit. Obtaining the visa and other documentation can cost between $4,000 and $7,000, Radwan said.
Even if the couple could afford a chauffeur, she doesn’t know where they would put him. They live in an apartment building in Jeddah that does not have rooms available for servants.
Her husband could give her a lift to work, but that would take him considerably out of his way.
Radwan used taxis while living abroad but avoids them in Saudi Arabia. Many cars are old and dirty, she said. In most cases, the meters don’t work, leaving passengers to haggle over the fare.
She and her friends used to be constantly swapping phone numbers for good drivers, but she said they weren’t always available.
“If you can’t find a driver, you have to wait for your husband. If not your husband, then your brother. And you know sometimes everyone is just so busy that going from point A to point B is really difficult,” she said. “You can’t even walk because [often] there’s no sidewalk, so you’re afraid of getting hit by a car.”
Now, the conversation with her friends has changed. If one of them needs a driver, they tell her, “Why don’t you take Uber or Careem?”
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Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

Q & A: The Saudi woman who dared to drive

The Los Angeles Times printed this interview with Manal al-Sharif by Emily Alpert. A link to it is here,  and text below.

Manal Sharif has been jailed, insulted and threatened. Her enemies faked her death, in a hamhanded bid to make an example of her. This year, she says, she was forced out of her job. Her life has been turned upside down by a crime that isn’t even a crime -- driving in her country, Saudi Arabia.

"There’s a famous saying in Arabic: When you oppress people, you make them heroes," she said. "I couldn’t understand why I was in jail. But that’s what created all this."

Driving isn’t actually illegal for women in Saudi Arabia, as Sharif is quick to point out. But because Muslim clerics have declared it forbidden, the traffic department refuses to grant women licenses. Sharif is among a group of women who have contested the ban.

Last year, after millions of people viewed an online video of her driving, Sharif was detained twice by police who insisted that she stop and demanded to know who was behind the campaign. She was released after an outcry but continued to face death threats and other attacks.

The furor also made her famous, feted as one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine and awarded a prize in Oslo for "creative dissent" -- a prize that ultimately cost Sharif her job when her employer told her she couldn’t leave the country to accept it, she said.

She did anyway, leaving her jobless after her trip to Europe this spring. But there is plenty for Sharif to do: The campaign that began as a plea to allow women to drive has expanded to contest all kinds of sexism in Saudi Arabia, where women must obtain permission from men to work, travel or study.

Activists are pushing for women to drive again Friday; an earlier driving protest was delayed after the death of the Saudi crown prince. The Times talked to Sharif about her quest in the year since she and her fellow activists urged Saudi women to get behind the wheel.
Why do you think driving has been so sensitive in Saudi Arabia, even more so than women voting?

There are people who will fight back because it's a financial loss for them. If you want to get a driver, you have to go to an office and give them money to bring you a driver from India or Indonesia. It's a business for them. We’ve been told they get 800 million riyals every year. So businessmen will do all kinds of campaigns to discredit us and say bad things about us. It's like a war.

Then there are the religious people. If they lose their grip on controlling women, they lose the grip on the whole society. We believe these smaller subjects are used to make people not discuss the more important thing, which is the male guardianship system for women. Being treated as a second-class citizen. All of this is the tip of the iceberg. There are children, 10 years old, and they drive because their moms or sisters cannot drive! A woman has to have her driver go with her to the office, go home, come pick her up, go home. This means more crowded streets and more pollution.
Do women defy the ban in their daily lives?
Sometimes it's really urgent and a woman has to drive, like the kid is dying. But usually the women do not know how. It's a very foreign act. My friend, her dad died in front of her waiting for the ambulance because she couldn’t drive. She said, "If I could drive I would have saved my father." Even if a woman wants to do it and knows how, your neighbors see you driving and call the religious police.

What has happened since the protests last year?
We’ve been talking to officials, writing articles, campaigning, trying to teach women to drive. I filed the first lawsuit against the traffic police for not issuing me a license. We believe the driving campaign rocked the boat. People talk about it now. The taboo has opened. There’s also been so much international attention.

I never understood it, why people are so interested in women driving. But when I met Kathryn Cameron Porter, president of the Leadership Council for Human Rights, in the United States, she said, "Manal, you find women who didn’t care because we take everything for granted, and when they see this, they say, 'What? This woman can’t drive because she’s a woman?'" It is the power of a single story.

Now anywhere you go, if they know one thing about Saudi Arabia, they know women cannot drive there. That means the government will be pressured to do something.

Do you believe this will change soon?
I believe if women want to change their reality, it will change. If women are silent, I don’t think anything will change. Rights are never given. Rights are taken.
We’re also hoping for some new and young blood (in the Saudi government). Sixty percent of us in this country are under 25, but the people in power are double our age. This creates a huge gap between us.

McManus: Change in Saudi Arabia

Los Angeles Times Op-Ed piece by Doyle McManus; deals with the driving issue among other things women are talking about and fighting for in Saudi Arabia. A link to the story is here and the text is below. It includes an interview with Saudi blogger Eman Al Nafjan, though he spells her name wrong. Eman's blog is here. She is also author of the op-ed in the Arab News that we posted here.

For Saudi women, progress comes slowly, and not at all surely.

Doyle McManus
December 25, 2011

Women in Saudi Arabia won a small but promising victory this year. No, they aren't being allowed to drive; that's still forbidden. Most of the time, they still can't work, travel or even open bank accounts without the approval of a male guardian. But they do have this: Saudi women can now buy lingerie in stores from female salesclerks, instead of the sometimes leering men who used to staff the counters. If this modest wave of liberalization continues, they may even get fitting rooms.

It doesn't sound like much, but in the glacial process of modernization in the tradition-bound kingdom, it's an important step. "This is the beginning of a real social change," Eman Nafjian, one of the new generation of Saudi women's activists, told me over coffee in Riyadh, the capital, last week. "It will allow more women to work in shopping malls. And that's a step toward more opportunities for women's employment in general."

It wasn't easy to win the right to sell lingerie. The change has been debated since 2005, but it was resisted by traditionalists who oppose allowing women to work outside the home — even though, in this case, the prohibition forced women to bargain with men over bras and panties. The rule was changed only after women spent two years agitating through a Facebook campaign called "Enough Embarrassment," and only after the (male) minister of labor was emboldened to obtain and enforce a decree from King Abdullah. (You'd think the king has more important things to do, but a royal decree is the only way anything of significance gets changed in Saudi Arabia.)

That's a microcosm, Nafjian said, of how life is improving for women in Saudi Arabia: slowly, and not at all surely. In Saudi terms, Abdullah is a modernizer; he's promoted education for women, including thousands of college scholarships in the United States, and he's even promised to begin appointing women to his official advisory council, the Shura — but not until 2013. (There's no elected legislature.) Still, each tiny step forward prompts furious resistance from traditionalists, including Islamic scholars who warn that change is irreligious and conservative women who say they like the old ways better.

The debate goes on even in Nafjian's own family, an affluent-but-not-wealthy clan in Riyadh's upper middle class. Her conservative uncle is furious at her for speaking out in public and has demanded that she stop. "He says I'm going to make us all pariahs," she said. "But my father and my brothers stood up for me."

Nafjian, 33, started a blog in English a few years ago, "Saudiwoman's Weblog" (www.saudiwoman.me), that brought the concerns of educated, upwardly mobile Saudi women to a global audience. She's written about basic rights (Saudi women still can't vote), child marriage (in rural areas, girls as young as 8 are sometimes given to older men in marriage) and issues of everyday life, like driving and shopping. "My father would prefer that I blogged about Saudi cooking," she laughed.

She walked into a hotel lobby for our meeting dressed in a black abaya, the head-to-toe garment that Saudi women wear in public, and a veil that concealed most but not all of her hair. She was trailed by her brother Khalid, who came along cheerfully as driver and chaperon. He said he supports her activism. "All these restrictions on women are nuts," he said. Her husband, a telecommunications engineer, supports her stances too, she said. She has three small children, she teaches English, and she's finishing work on a doctorate in linguistics.

The Saudi women's movement won international attention last June when at least five women were arrested for daring to drive their own cars in the country's cities. (Nafjian, who never learned to drive, videotaped the protest as a passenger in a friend's car.) But driving wasn't the main thing that made the government angry (driving by women is tolerated in rural areas); it was the challenge of a noisy, well-publicized protest.

"The driving issue has become a little tedious," Nafjian said. "The ban will be changed one of these days; I'm sure of it. But for the moment, they're happy that all we're asking for is women driving instead of the downfall of the government."

More important than driving, she said, are issues such as basic legal rights (a woman's testimony in court still gets only half the weight of a man's), employment (women are still restricted to jobs where they won't have to mingle with men — mostly teaching, nursing and, now, sales work in women's shops), and the persistent rural practice of forcing young girls into marriage. "It's socially unacceptable to most Saudis," Nafjian said, "but it's a tradition, so there's a lot of resistance to outlawing it."

Does that mean Saudi Arabia's modernizing urban women want to scrap the monarchy — the ultimate patriarchal system — and fast-forward to democracy? Quite the contrary. "A revolution like the ones they had in Egypt and Tunisia would be the worst-case scenario here," Nafjian said. "Most Saudis are conservative. A popular uprising here would make the [militant] Salafists in Egypt look like liberals. We would turn into Taliban."

If she's right, the country's liberals, democrats and cultural modernizers are trapped in the odd predicament of relying on an 87-year-old king and his male heirs for protection. The best-case scenario, she said, would be for a progressive wing of the royal family to rise to power once Abdullah is gone, men who would continue nudging the Saudi economy into the 21st century while keeping the nation's politics firmly rooted in the 7th. But there's no guarantee; the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Nayef, is a noted conservative — and an apparently healthy 78.

Meanwhile, Nafjian said, Saudi Arabia's women will keep organizing through private coffee circles and Internet chatrooms. "We can't be a formal association," she noted. "That's illegal."

And they'll welcome all the foreign attention they can get, as they did during the one-day driving protest in June.

"When foreigners make noise over women's rights, that's a good thing, because we're not allowed to," she said. "The more embarrassing an issue is to the government, the more likely it is to be resolved."

After all, they did get that change in the lingerie stores. By this time next year, with luck, they might even be allowed to drive.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times