RIYADH — Deputy Minister of Communications and Information Technology Eng. Haytham Al-Ohali said that the rate of Saudi women’s participation in the telecommunications and technology sector has increased from 7 percent to 25 percent during the past three years. “This reflected positively on the growth of the sector’s participation rate in the non-oil gross domestic product (GDP),” he said while addressing the opening session of the 3rd edition of the Women’s Empowerment Forum, organized here on Monday virtually by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology on the occasion of the International Women’s Day. The event was held under the auspices of Minister of Communications and Information Technology Eng. Abdullah Al-Swaha, and the presence of a number of speakers from the government and private sectors. Al-Ohali stressed that the Kingdom ranked third among G20 countries in the entrepreneurship index as women outperformed men for the first time in the Kingdom in 2020. Al-Ohali said that the ministry has trained and qualified as many as 50 women to take up jobs in key positions during the past nine months, while it aims to qualify 150 female leaders for the labor market over the coming three years. In her speech, Princess Haifa Al-Muqrin, Saudi Arabia’s permanent representative to UNESCO, said that 60 percent of the staff in the Kingdom’s mission at UNESCO are women while the representation of women in international organizations is still below the required level, whether at the Arab or Global levels. “Only 42 of UNESCO’S 193 countries are represented by women ambassadors, and the rest are men,” she said while emphasizing that diplomacy is an art in which Saudi women are mastering. Women constitute 54% of Saudi technology graduates For her part, Dr. Inas Al-Issa, rector of Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, said that 54 percent of technology graduates in the Kingdom are women, saying that this reflects the large investment in the women’s educational sector in the Kingdom. “Around 47 percent of the technical teaching members of Princess Nourah University are women,” she said while calling for increasing women’s empowerment in the field of technology, as 27 percent of technology graduates get job opportunities in the first year of their graduation, compared to 63 percent of men. Women represent 87% of new labor market entrants Addressing the event, Deputy Minister of Human Resources for Saudization Majed Al-Dahwi said that women represent 87 percent of new entrants to the labor market during 2020. “There has been a decrease in the unemployment rate from 34.5 percent to 30.2 percent in the same year while the share of women in the labor market during the last two years reached 31.3 percent from 23 percent in 2018. “The women’s economic participation increased from 20.5 percent to 31.4 percent, as more than 600,000 female employees are currently employed in the private sector,” he said. The minister revealed that 3,000 accountants, 1,300 pharmacists, and more than 400 dentists have entered the labor market. “The decision to Saudize information technology from coming June will provide 15,000 jobs for women,” he pointed out. According to Al-Dahwi, 270,000 women have obtained documents for practicing self-employment during the year 2020 while 42,000 entered the labor market remotely.