Women’s Right to Vote in Saudi Arabia, Women's Suffrage
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Culture Women's Day Saudi Arabia

Women's Right to Vote / December 12, (2015)

SA

When did women get the right to vote in Saudi Arabia?

This date needs more context than most on this calendar. Saudi Arabia has no established national commemoration of its own for this day, and the date itself is genuinely layered, closer to Afghanistan’s case than to most countries here. On September 25, 2011, King Abdullah announced that women would be allowed to vote and run as candidates, but only starting with the next municipal elections, then scheduled for 2015. The legal text making that possible followed later, drafted into Royal Decree M/61 of 2014. Women didn’t actually cast a ballot until December 12, 2015, four years after the announcement. We use that date, the day the right was first exercised rather than merely promised, because it’s the clearest, most verifiable milestone in an otherwise gradual, decree-driven process.

What the date doesn’t convey on its own is the scale of what it applies to. Saudi Arabia has never held a national election, for anyone, of any gender. The country is an absolute monarchy; its Shura Council, the body that advises the king, is entirely appointed, not elected. Municipal councils, the only elected bodies that exist at all, handle local matters like waste collection and street maintenance, not policy. And the December 2015 vote wasn’t the start of a new normal, it was a single event: no municipal elections of any kind, for men or women, have been held in Saudi Arabia since. As of this writing, Saudi women have voted exactly once, a decade ago, in the only election the country has held in that entire time.




How did Saudi women win the vote?

  • 2005. Saudi Arabia held its first modern municipal elections. Women were excluded from voting and from running as candidates.
  • 2009. King Abdullah appointed Norah al-Faiz as deputy education minister, the first woman to hold a ministerial-level post.
  • 2010. Historian Hatoon al-Fassi founded the “Baladi” (My Country) initiative to prepare women for eventual political participation, years before that participation was legally possible.
  • September 25, 2011. King Abdullah announced, in a speech to the Shura Council, that women would be permitted to vote and run for office starting with the 2015 municipal elections.
  • 2013. Thirty women were appointed to the 150-seat Shura Council for the first time, 20% of the body, formalized by royal decree.
  • 2014. Royal Decree M/61 wrote the 2011 promise into electoral law, specifying voter and candidate requirements for the coming election.
  • August 2015. Voter and candidate registration opened for women for the first time in the country’s history.
  • December 12, 2015. Around 130,000 women registered to vote, compared to 1.35 million men, and 978 women registered as candidates, alongside 5,938 men. Twenty-one women were elected to municipal council seats nationwide.
  • 2015. Salma bint Hizab al-Oteibi became the first elected female politician in Saudi history, winning a seat in Madrakah municipality, Mecca province.
  • 2016. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched Vision 2030, setting an explicit target of raising women’s workforce participation from 22% to 30%.
  • 2017. A royal decree began dismantling parts of the male guardianship system, and the ban on women driving was lifted the following year.
  • 2019. Royal Decree M/134 repealed further guardianship restrictions, allowing women to apply for passports and travel independently for the first time.
  • Since 2015. No municipal elections, and no national elections of any kind, have been held in Saudi Arabia for anyone, of any gender.

Key Women in the Saudi Women’s Rights Movement

Wajeha al-Huwaider (1957- )
One of the earliest and most internationally visible Saudi feminists, al-Huwaider campaigned against the driving ban and male guardianship system in the early 2000s, well before either was formally on the government’s reform agenda.

Madeha al-Ajroush (1953- )
A psychotherapist and activist, al-Ajroush took part in Saudi Arabia’s first driving protest in 1990 and continued advocating for women’s rights, including political participation, for decades after. She was briefly detained in 2018 during a crackdown on women’s rights activists.

Hatoon al-Fassi (1962- )
A historian specializing in women’s history, al-Fassi founded the Baladi initiative in 2010 to prepare women for political participation years ahead of the law itself, and was among the first women to register to vote in 2015. She was detained in 2018 and released in 2019.

Thoraya Obaid (1945- )
The first Saudi national to head a UN agency, leading UNFPA from 2000 to 2010, Obaid became one of the first women appointed to the Shura Council in 2013, bringing decades of international diplomatic experience into the country’s formal political institutions.

Salma bint Hizab al-Oteibi
Al-Oteibi became the first woman elected to public office in Saudi history, winning a municipal council seat in Madrakah, Mecca province, in the December 2015 elections, the same election that remains, a decade later, the only one Saudi women have ever voted in.

Loujain al-Hathloul (1989- )
Best known for her driving activism, al-Hathloul’s campaigning extended to broader political rights, and led to repeated arrests, including nearly three years’ imprisonment beginning in 2018. Her case became one of the starkest illustrations of the gap between Saudi Arabia’s formal reforms and its treatment of the women who pushed for them.

Why this day matters today

Two very different stories are true in Saudi Arabia at once. Economically, change has been real and fast: female labor force participation rose from roughly 17-22% in 2016 to 36.2% by early 2025, one of the sharpest such gains recorded anywhere in the world over that period, driven by lifting the driving ban, loosening guardianship rules, and Vision 2030’s explicit targets. Women now own an estimated 42-45% of the country’s small and medium businesses.

Politically, almost nothing has moved. The single election in which Saudi women have ever voted was held in 2015 and has not been repeated. The male guardianship system was significantly reformed in 2019, but not eliminated; elements of it persist in specific legal and family contexts. And the same years that saw these economic reforms also saw the arrest and imprisonment of the activists, Loujain al-Hathloul among them, who had spent years publicly demanding exactly the rights the government was now, separately, choosing to grant.

Explore current data at Gender Gap Saudi Arabia.

Culture Women’s Day within Women, Culture and Peace

Culture Women’s Day Saudi Arabia is part of a larger framework: Women, Culture and Peace (WCP). WCP builds on UNESCO’s Culture of Peace programme and the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda.

WCP works through culture, art, and community rather than formal institutions alone. It follows a women-centered organizing model, developed by scholars Stall and Stoecker, that builds relationships and shared leadership instead of competing for power. For a country where political organizing itself carries real personal risk, that framing matters more than usual: this page is not asking anyone inside Saudi Arabia to take a public stand. It’s an invitation to those elsewhere, including the wider Saudi diaspora, to mark the day in solidarity.

Women’s Days for Culture of Peace marks a day for every UN member state, 193 in total. Each day recognizes a nation’s path toward women’s political voice, and opens space to reflect on peacebuilding, gender equality, and the work still ahead, wherever that path currently stands.

What could Culture Women’s Day Saudi Arabia become?

This is not a day for domestic celebration in the way most of this calendar’s other 192 days are. Saudi Arabia’s own government has never designated it as one, and given the country’s political system, doing so ourselves would misrepresent what December 12, 2015, actually was: a single, tightly bounded event, not an ongoing civic tradition.

What it can become instead is a point of global solidarity. It could be the day people outside Saudi Arabia, and Saudi women themselves, wherever they are able to safely engage, learn the fuller story: al-Fassi’s decade of preparation before the law even existed, al-Hathloul’s imprisonment for demanding rights the state would later grant on its own terms, an election held once and never repeated. It could become an occasion to track, honestly, both halves of the story above, the real economic gains and the frozen political ones, rather than letting either one stand alone.

Ideas for celebration and reflection

These are starting points, not a program, and here more than anywhere else on this calendar, safety comes first. Pick what resonates. Leave the rest.

  • Online. A short post or story marking the day from outside Saudi Arabia, using #CultureWomensDay or #WCP, linked to the wider calendar of 193 days.
  • In schools. A classroom discussion, elsewhere in the world, on what it means for a country’s economic reforms and political rights to move at completely different speeds.
  • In culture. Reading about the women’s rights activists named on this page, several of whom were imprisoned for the same demands their government later granted through decree.
  • In organizations. A pause during a team meeting to mark the day and discuss what genuine political voice requires beyond a single vote.
  • In the diaspora. For Saudi women living abroad, a space to mark the day on their own terms, without the constraints that apply at home.
  • In communities. A broader conversation connecting Saudi Arabia’s story to the wider question of how economic and political rights for women move, or fail to move, together.

Some of these need an afternoon. Others need only a sentence shared with a colleague. Both matter.

A growing network, one country at a time

Saudi Arabia’s inclusion in this network matters precisely because its story doesn’t fit the pattern most of this calendar tells. Most of the 193 days here mark a hard-won, durable, expanding right. This one marks something narrower and still unresolved: a right granted by decree, exercised once, and not repeated since. Holding that fact alongside 192 other countries’ stories is part of what makes an honest global calendar honest.

Looking Forward

Culture Women’s Day Saudi Arabia sits at an unusual point on this calendar: a country making some of the fastest economic progress for women anywhere in the world, and simultaneously one of the slowest to extend any real political voice, even the narrow, local kind, on an ongoing basis. December 12, 2015, was real. So is the fact that it hasn’t happened again in a decade.

The invitation stands open, and it looks different here than it does elsewhere on this calendar. Explore the Women, Culture and Peace framework, browse the calendar of 193 national days, and if you’re able to safely do so, wherever you are, mark December 12 as a day of solidarity with Saudi women, not as a closed chapter.

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