When Americans think of countries with strict gender regulations, Saudi Arabia is often one of the first to come to mind. For decades, the kingdom had many restrictions affecting women’s daily lives: They could not drive, work in public-facing roles, or travel abroad without a male guardian’s permission.

And yet, beginning in 2011, something strange and, to many observers, unexpected began to happen. Saudi women started showing up to work in offices and airports, shopping malls, and engineering firms. Then, in 2018, women gained the right to drive. Male guardianship laws were relaxed in 2019. And in 2023, Rayyanah Barnawi, a Saudi engineer, became the first Arab woman in space.

“The transition has been really remarkable,” says Jennifer Peck ’06, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore who has spent years studying women’s participation in the Saudi workforce. In 2011, only 10% of Saudi women were employed, compared to 56% of men. By 2024, the share of women working had tripled to 34%.

For Peck, who investigates how and why one of the world’s most conservative countries experienced such a rapid transformation, the story is personal.

She grew up in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, where her parents worked for Aramco, the state-owned oil company. The family lived in a compound in Dhahran, a bubble that felt more Midwestern than Middle Eastern.

“It was like a small town in Iowa transplanted to the desert,” Peck recalls.

Inside the compound, her mother could drive, wear jeans, and live an ordinary American life.

But the moment she left the gates, the rules shifted. Her mother donned a black abaya and could not drive. Even the local Baskin-Robbins was segregated.

There was a door for men, Peck remembers, “and three feet away, there was a door for women.”

That dual reality — a country simultaneously globalizing and deeply conservative — left a lasting impression.

At Swarthmore, economics wasn’t on Peck’s radar until an introductory course revealed how the discipline could tackle the questions she’d been turning over since childhood.

“I realized economics can be really powerful because it’s so versatile,” she says. “It gives you a set of tools you can use to ask all kinds of meaningful questions — and provide insights that can have a real impact.”

She graduated with a degree in economics and Greek, then pursued a Ph.D. at MIT. Her dissertation explored a “surprising puzzle,” as she puts it: Why were so many Saudi citizens unemployed in a country that hosted millions of foreign workers?

The Arab Spring protests in 2011, which coincided with Peck’s thesis, gave the problem a new urgency. For Saudi authorities, high levels of unemployment had become untenable.

That year, the government imposed strict quotas: Firms had to replace foreign workers with Saudis or face steep penalties. The policy was mostly designed to help unemployed young men find work. But as firms scrambled to comply, they started looking to the other half of the population, too.

In 2012, restrictions on women’s employment began to ease. What followed, Peck discovered, was a complete transformation.

“Imposing the quotas was not a gendered policy,” says Peck, who has published several papers analyzing the transition. “But once a few women started to get hired, it snowballed.”

Jennifer Peck ’06

“I realized economics can be really powerful because it’s so versatile,” she says. “It gives you a set of tools you can use to ask all kinds of meaningful questions — and provide insights that can have a real impact.”

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The magnitude of the change was sometimes even driven by preferences for gender segregation.  “There would be an accounting floor that was all male expats,” she adds, “that they would completely replace with Saudi women accountants who were looking for work.”

The numbers tell a dramatic story. In 2010, 55,000 women were employed in the private sector. Just three years later, that figure had jumped to 454,000.

Once women were working, the Saudi government began to see women’s employment as a source of economic opportunity. Further reforms enhanced women’s mobility and access: By 2018, women were driving legally. Guardianship laws loosened the following year. Families increasingly began encouraging daughters to attend university, knowing they could now put their degrees to use.

Digging into the data, Peck saw how an economic policy had begun to reshape society. And her visits to the country confirmed it.

“There were suddenly Saudi ladies working at retail counters, and in movie theaters, which was amazing to me,” says Peck. “When I was growing up, there were no movie theaters, and there were no women working in public.”

What began as an economic puzzle has become, in Peck’s analysis, a story of unintended consequences, in which one of the world’s most conservative and repressive societies began to edge towards greater equality in a way that benefited women, their families, and Saudi society.

And Peck’s research has brought her full circle in more ways than one. In 2014 she joined the Swarthmore faculty.

“It was really a dream to come back to the College,” she says, “and to have my professors become my colleagues.”

Today, thinking critically about the complexity, and sometimes unpredictability, of global change is something Peck encourages in her students. “I always tell them they’re in class not to get the right answer,” she says, “but to learn how to do this — to become practitioners of this mode of analysis and use it to make a difference.”

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