This is awesome. When I was growing up, in Saudi Arabia, I never once saw a Saudi woman at a desk. I've read that King Abdul Aziz University actively recruits women professors and students, and that's such a wonderful thing to hear.
KSA is the least influential in the region, culturally. Anything Saudi is synonymous with inflexibility. Even religious extremists go to Kuwait, UAE and the UK for their meetings. King Abdul Aziz University is a good thing, but KAUST blows it out of the water! I was skeptical at first then did a little research. KAUST is not exactly the MIT of the middle-east, but it's up there with Cornell and CMU. Not only is it the second co-ed institution in Saudi Arabia (the first is the Ka'bah in Mecca, where Muslims go for pilgrimage, side-by-side, but you already knew that ;-) but it's also a place with a strong theoretical bias.
I heard the complaints from right-wing groups when they said "it's a place for boys and girls to sit side by side and learn useless abstract mathematics that will server neither God nor the nation", and I thought ... FUCK YEAH!
My younger sister finished medical school only a few years ago, but because she speaks 4-languages and has a master's degree, she went on to manage an entire clinic, and soon after that the investors sent her to training in hospitality and gave her a hotel to manage, then a second. This is in Oman, btw. I know it's anecdotal evidence, but you couldn't imagine a 27 year old woman managing hotels and hospitals with a staff of several hundred. (I was worried they might be framing her for "something", but I went over her paperwork and it's all kosher; she answers to a board of directors and has clear rights, responsibilities, budget, and reporting procedures. She has been at it for 3 years now.)
Similarly, when dealing with companies in Gulf, I have seen a few repeating patterns in management. You have the national institutions headed by tribal/military chiefs, you have the domestically owned companies headed by foreign expertise, then you have this new breed of "agile" companies headed by women and young people that don't seem to respect the traditional order and hierarchy. Ten years ago, a Request for Proposal was a joke; a formality to waste people's time before the contract was given to the CEO's cousin.
