Via Christine Burke in bloomberg.com: But in 2018, there were some winds of change. Saudi Arabia became the world’s last country to permit female motorists. It later announced reforms allowing women to set up businesses without male consent, hold a job while being pregnant and travel independently. In four years, the female labor participation rate nearly doubled to about 37%. Today Albassam scouts for deals for Silicon Valley venture capital firm Graphene Ventures as a principal in Riyadh and other women like her are climbing the ranks of business and finance — trading stocks, forging mergers and running companies. Rare interviews with almost a dozen senior female leaders in Saudi Arabia show a dramatic about turn in a country that had few women workers a decade ago. Some who had never spoken publicly before agreed to interviews on the record because they were keen to highlight the advances. Others asked not to be named because they didn’t want to discuss their lives publicly, but even they were deeply optimistic about the prospects for local women in the workplace.
