JEDDAH: The first thing Dalya does when entering a lingerie shop in Saudi Arabia is scan the area for men after an embarrassing encounter a year ago. With colorful lace, cotton and sheer bras on display, the 26-year-old vividly remembers when she randomly picked one up to examine it only to be surprised by a male voice saying: “That is not your size, you need one two sizes bigger”. It was a salesman trying to be helpful, she discovered, though she was further unnerved when she realized he had correctly estimated her size. Lingerie shops in the Kingdom are still mostly staffed by male employees. “I was shocked because I realized that the salesman actually scanned my body, even though I was covered in my abaya, and he actually got the right size,” said Dalya, whose last name has been withheld to protect her privacy. “That made me very uncomfortable.” Dalya's discomfort with the state of affairs is a growing concern among Saudi women who are forced to buy their intimate clothing from men in a society where female modesty is paramount. “Imagine, a (strange) man looking at your underwear. This is very embarrassing... We grew up on modesty and religion. Our private things should not be visible to strangers,” said Fatima Qaroob, who launched a campaign last month calling for such salesmen to be replaced by women. “I felt like I was being stripped naked,” she said, recalling an incident when a cashier at a lingerie shop rummaged through items she had selected in search of the price tag. However, Qaroob's “Enough Embarrassment” campaign is not the first attempt to replace salesmen in the country. Saudi businesses resisted a 2006 government decree urging them to hire only women employees for shops selling intimate female products on the grounds that such a change would bring a rise in costs related to the country's strict rules on segregation. A boycott by a group of Saudi women against lingerie shops failed to pressure businesses into implementing the 2006 decree because there were no alternative ways of buying underwear. “If we as women boycotted these stores, what is our alternative? Where are we going to buy from?” Qaroob said. She has decided that her campaign – which was launched from Jeddah and has gathered more than 6,300 supporters so far – will focus on making the changes for businesses easier. Many Saudi women work as teachers in female-only schools, a profession sanctioned by the clerics, but there is a growing number of businesswomen, female doctors and young professional women who are trying to break down the barriers. Senior Ulema (scholars) spoke out against a recent labor ministry attempt to hire women as cashiers in some supermarkets, saying the strictures on segregation prohibited women from working in areas in the supermarket that were accessible to men. Even though the women were stationed in the “family only” sections of the supermarkets, the board endorsed a religious edict which objected to the idea on the grounds that the women might have come into contact with some males. One lingerie store chain, Nayomi, decided to adopt the campaign to hire women. They made all the required changes and opened 20 stores around the Kingdom, all staffed by women. But poor sales owing to a lack of male customers, the high cost of ensuring security, the inability to lure customers with a window display and the reluctance of some women employees to work on late shifts led to financial losses and closure. Nayomi Sales Manager Homaida Diab also said that in some parts of the country the employment of women was not accepted at all, which lowered sales while adding costs of about SR3,000 ($800) a month for each store to hire male security guards. Diab estimates that Saudis spend over SR500 million a year on lingerie and said that despite their eagerness for employment, transportation and social issues in Saudi Arabia made it harder for women to work in the retail environment. “The circumstances for women to work two shifts were difficult in terms of transportation and there were also social issues that made women less dedicated,” he said.
