Saudi Women Are 73% of Science Graduates and 12% of Engineering Graduates

72.6% and 12.1%. Those are the shares of Saudi Arabia’s tertiary graduates who were women in two fields that both sit inside the word STEM — natural sciences, mathematics and statistics on one side, engineering, manufacturing and construction on the other — in 2022, the most recent year whose UNESCO submission is internally consistent [S1]. A sixty-point spread separates two halves of the same acronym, which is why almost every published figure for Saudi women STEM graduates is defensible and almost none is informative.

That spread is why the claim that Saudi women lead the world in STEM education is simultaneously true and useless. It is true of science. It is not true of engineering, where Saudi Arabia’s 12.1% is the lowest figure in the Gulf — below Qatar at 43.9%, the United Arab Emirates at 43.2% and Bahrain at 35.7%, and below the United States at 24.9%, the United Kingdom at 27.7% and Germany at 21.5% [S1]. Against a global average of 28%, Saudi Arabia sits at less than half [S2].

The second half of the story is what happens after graduation. Saudi women’s labour force participation was 33.9% in the first quarter of 2026, down 2.4 percentage points from the 36.3% recorded a year earlier, and the share of Saudi women actually in work fell further still, from 32.5% to 30.8% [S3]. A country that graduates women at 52.2% of all degrees, and at nearly three quarters of its science degrees, employs expatriates in about 78% of its jobs [S4].

This analysis separates two problems the phrase “women in STEM” merges: a field-allocation problem, in which Saudi women are concentrated in the sciences and nearly absent from engineering for institutional rather than legal reasons; and a labour-allocation problem, in which the science graduates who do exist are not visible in the occupations their degrees describe. For the quarterly participation series, see the companion analysis of Saudi women’s falling workforce participation; for the full arc since 2016, see the pillar page on women in the Saudi workforce.

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

What share of Saudi STEM graduates are women?

38.8% on UNESCO’s published indicator for 2022, against a global average of 35% — but the aggregate share of Saudi women STEM graduates is close to meaningless on its own, because the answer ranges from 12.1% to 72.6% depending on which part of STEM is meant.

UNESCO defines STEM as three ISCED fields: natural sciences, mathematics and statistics (05); information and communication technologies (06); and engineering, manufacturing and construction (07). Health and medicine sit outside that definition, in field 09, although most press coverage folds them in. Here is what each definition produces for Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, 2022. Every figure comes from the same UNESCO submission for the same year [S1].

The choice of field moves the headline by 60.5 percentage points, and the two definitions most likely to be quoted — “STEM plus health” at 43.2% and “engineering only” at 12.1% — are 31 points apart. Note which category does the inflating: not medicine, which UNESCO excludes from STEM, but natural sciences, a field that is 72.6% female and only 7.6% of graduates.

Two further numbers anchor the picture. Saudi women were 52.2% of all tertiary graduates, so they do outnumber men among graduates overall. And 2% of Saudi women graduates took an engineering degree against 19% of men — a ratio UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report states directly: “Only 2% of women graduate from engineering compared to 19% of men; conversely, 30% of women graduate from education, arts and humanities, compared to 13% of men” [S5].

The composition is also moving against women. Between 2019 and 2024 computing nearly doubled its share of all Saudi graduates, from 6.8% to 13.0%, and engineering rose from 7.1% to 10.8%, while natural sciences slipped from 8.1% to 7.8% and education collapsed from 13.4% to 2.4% [S1]. Output is being reallocated toward exactly the fields where women are least represented, which means the aggregate can fall even when no individual field worsens — and between 2019 and 2022 it did, from 41.7% to 38.8% [S1]. The education quality analysis covers the wider employability problem; the point here is arithmetic. A single STEM percentage cannot describe a system in which one field is 73% female and another is 12%.

Why nobody publishes this number, and how we got it

No statistical agency publishes a ready-made female share of engineering graduates — not for Saudi Arabia and not for any country. UNESCO publishes only the aggregate. The World Bank maintains a series definition for exactly this indicator, SE.TER.GRAD.FE.EN.ZS, and it returns zero observations, for every country, in every year [S1]. That absence explains why the aggregate dominates coverage: it is the only field-level number that is easy to look up.

The figures here are reconstructed from three published UNESCO series per field — the share of all graduates in that field, and the shares of female and of male graduates in it — which together determine the female share exactly. It was validated three ways: it returns an identical result from all nine fields of study independently; it reproduces UNESCO’s published STEM indicator to two decimal places for every year from 2015 to 2022, and UNESCO’s prose statement that “70% of students completing a degree in natural sciences, mathematics and statistics were women in 2019, compared to only 4% in engineering, manufacturing and construction” [S2]; and its implied female share of all 2022 graduates, 52.17%, matches GASTAT’s own count of 166,928 women among 319,969 graduates [S10].

Saudi Arabia filed no return for 2023, and its 2024 submission does not reconcile with itself: the published STEM share reads 45.63% while the field tables imply 39.8%, in a series where the two agree to two decimals every year from 2015 to 2022. Alongside that, tertiary enrolment rises 28% in two years and graduates in unspecified fields quadruple. Every headline figure here is therefore stated for 2022. Engineering is the most robust number in the set: three independent reconstructions run for this analysis converge on 12.0–12.1% for 2022, and return 2024 values spanning 12–15%.

Where the circulating figures come from

Several numbers are in simultaneous use, and they do not describe the same thing.

None is wrong about the aggregate. All are silent on the field split, which is where the finding sits. Any statement about Saudi women STEM graduates has to name the field before it means anything.

Is Saudi Arabia a world leader in women’s STEM education?

In natural sciences it is near the top but not at it. In engineering it is behind every comparator we could find, including the Western economies usually cited as the problem cases.

Female shares of each field’s graduates, reconstructed on the same basis from UNESCO field-of-study tables, latest available year per country [S1].

Two readings follow. The Arab states as a group have unusually high female participation in engineering study — a pattern UNESCO has documented repeatedly, and one that cuts against the assumption that socially conservative countries produce few women engineers [S2]. Saudi Arabia is the exception within that group, not an example of it, and the gap with its immediate neighbours runs to 24–32 percentage points. Its 72.6% in natural sciences, meanwhile, is exceeded by Tunisia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain alike. The “highest in the world” framing survives in neither direction.

Applying the same reconstruction to every reporting country puts Saudi Arabia around 17th of 118 on the STEM aggregate, 9th of 115 on computing — genuinely near the top — and 112th of 117 on engineering, against a global median near 29% [S1]. Those three ranks belong to one country in one year. The GCC education benchmark covers the region.

Can women be engineers in Saudi Arabia?

Yes, and the legal question was settled some years ago. The constraint sat in the university system, not the labour code.

Articles 149 and 150 of the Labour Law — prohibiting women from dangerous occupations and from working during an eleven-hour night period — were repealed by Royal Decree M/5 of 7/1/1442H, in August 2020, along with the gender bar in the mines and quarries chapter [S18]. On the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2026 assessment Saudi Arabia scores 100 out of 100 on the legal framework for pay and occupational access, the Bank recording “no restrictions could be located” against night work, hazardous work, mining, construction, manufacturing, transport and energy [S6]. Its aggregate legal score is 56.23, supportive frameworks 71.95, enforcement perceptions 50.68; its weakest legal topics are Marriage and Assets, both 25.00 [S6]. Employment law has been equalised far faster than family law, and that asymmetry bears more on whether a woman sustains a twenty-year career than on whether she can begin one.

The binding constraint on entry was supply of places. Saudi higher education was gender-segregated and engineering faculties sat almost entirely at men’s institutions. Effat University in Jeddah introduced architecture and electrical and computer engineering in the 2005/06 academic year, offered “for the first time in the history of Saudi women’s education” [S7]; King Abdulaziz University opened the first engineering college for women at a public university in 2013 [S19]. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) — the Kingdom’s strongest engineering school, ranked 63rd in the QS World University Rankings 2027 — admitted women to postgraduate study in 2019/20 and to bachelor’s programmes only in 2021/22 [S8]. It now states that women make up “50% of our engineering admissions” [S8].

That timing governs how the graduate data reads. A four-year degree begun in 2021 produces graduates in 2025, so the 12.1% recorded for 2022 reflects admissions decisions taken well before the largest openings. The move from 3.8% in 2019 to 12.1% in 2022 is the leading edge of that change, not its steady state.

Why so few Saudi women study engineering

Not because of measured ability, which points firmly the other way. Saudi Arabia runs gender-segregated schooling from grade 1, and in that structure girls substantially outperform boys. On TIMSS 2019, Saudi grade-4 boys scored below girls by approximately 26 points in mathematics and 60 points in science; at grade 8 the gaps were approximately 17 points and 47 points [S9]. The World Bank team that produced those findings with Saudi Arabia’s Education and Training Evaluation Commission put it plainly: “the gender differences observed in Saudi Arabia are consistently among the largest in the world, with girls showing a consistent advantage, across grade levels and subject areas” [S9].

That rules out several explanations at once. Saudi women do not avoid quantitative subjects — they take 72.6% of mathematics and natural sciences degrees — and they do not underperform in school science. What remains is the structure of what was on offer, plus the expectations following from a labour market whose default destination for a female science graduate was, for decades, a classroom. The sibling analysis of Saudi education outcomes against university rankings documents a related divergence: between 2019 and 2023 grade-4 science rose from 402 to 428 while grade-8 science fell from 431 to 419.

Is the gender gap in Saudi STEM closing?

In engineering it is closing quickly. In computing it is widening. The aggregate conceals both.

Female shares of graduates in each field [S1]. The provisional 2024 submission points the same way on engineering.

Engineering has more than tripled from a very low base and, on KFUPM’s stated intake, has considerably further to run. Computing has moved the opposite way at exactly the moment the field expanded, from 6.8% of all Saudi graduates in 2019 to 13.0% in 2024. The growth in Saudi computing graduates has been disproportionately male. Given the Kingdom’s technology and artificial intelligence ambitions, that is the more consequential of the two trends and the one moving in the wrong direction.

How many Saudi women work as engineers?

Roughly 4,900, on the best available reading of Saudi Council of Engineers data — and the Kingdom’s statistical system does not publish the figure directly.

The Council is the licensing body: under Article 2 of the Engineering Professions Practice Law, “no one shall be allowed to practice any engineering profession without obtaining professional accreditation from the Authority” [S11]. Its register is the closest thing to a census of practising engineers. In August 2024 it reported 448,528 engineers, technicians and specialists working in the Kingdom, Saudi nationals 34.17% of that total and women 3.19% of Saudi engineers and technicians [S12] — implying about 4,900 women, consistent with the Council’s own series, which records registered female engineers rising from 2,633 in 2019 to 4,304 in 2021 [S13].

Here is the comparison the aggregate STEM number cannot produce.

Health is the control case. Where women are 57.1% of graduates they are 45.6% of the workforce — a gap, but a normal one. Where women are 12.1% of engineering graduates they are 3.2% of registered engineers.

The empty rows are not an oversight. GASTAT publishes employed Saudi women by occupation only at the one-digit level — Professionals 35.1%, Clerical support 20.7%, Technicians 9.4%, Managers 6.6% in Q1 2026 [S10]. The category that would isolate science and engineering professionals is not published for Saudi Arabia, and the International Labour Organization holds no Saudi occupational data broken down by sex. By economic activity the picture is starker: 22.71% of employed Saudi women work in education, 11.50% in construction, 8.89% in health and social work, 2.53% in professional, scientific and technical activities and 1.18% in information and communication [S10].

One circulated figure should be retired. The claim that “only 17% of Saudi female STEM graduates work in STEM sectors” appears in Arab News alongside a 38% graduate share [S14] and has since been repeated in peer-reviewed work. We traced it to an unattributed statistics box and found no statistical origin in any agency publication. It may be directionally right; it is not a number anyone can check, and the Council register is the better evidence.

Why do Saudi women leave STEM careers?

The strongest documented answer is that the problem is not specific to STEM: it affects university-educated Saudi women generally, and it runs opposite to the usual assumption.

Farah Kaddah’s diagnostic for Harvard’s Growth Lab finds the female employment surge was driven by women without university degrees. “Despite their high participation, university-educated women face the highest unemployment rate at 25%, compared to 10% for less than high school educated women,” the paper states, and “among university-educated women, younger females aged 25-35 face the highest unemployment rate at 32%.” Critically: “this issue is unique to Saudi women, as Saudi men with higher education levels tend to have lower unemployment rates” [S15]. The paper is a draft for discussion and its figures should be read as such.

The explanation offered is demand-side. “Female graduates have traditionally concentrated in fields like education, health, and the arts — sectors that rely heavily on government spending and are less linked to broader economic demand” [S15]. Women’s employment in education and health together fell from over 65% of female employment in 2016 to roughly 37% by 2022, as the private sector absorbed less-educated women into retail, manufacturing and food services. The graduate cohort faced a public sector that had stopped expanding, and education collapsed as a field of study over the same period, from 13.4% of all graduates to 2.4% [S1].

GASTAT’s own data settles this for Saudi nationals, and it settles it by sex. Table 2-3-2 of the Q1 2026 Labour Market Statistics reports unemployment among holders of a diploma or higher by educational specialisation, with engineering and computing reported separately [S10].

A Saudi woman holding a computing qualification faces roughly three times the unemployment rate of a Saudi man holding the same one, and in engineering close to three times. The qualification is identical on both sides of that comparison, so neither figure can be explained by the pipeline.

The same table disciplines the conclusion. This is not a STEM phenomenon: the gap appears in all nine specialisations GASTAT publishes, the widest ratio is in education at 4.0× rather than engineering, and natural sciences has the narrowest at 2.1×. That is Kaddah’s finding restated in Saudi official statistics — the penalty attaches to being a university-educated Saudi woman, not to holding a technical degree. Engineering graduates are not the worst-placed group, and computing graduates are worse placed.

Hana Al-Sayed, founder and chief executive of the consultancy Wujud and a systems engineer of twenty-five years’ standing, made the demand-side point directly in 2018: “It is not enough to just push and motivate women to be educated in sciences and in computer science in particular if the industry is not conducive to women” [S16]. The counter-testimony matters equally. Fatimah Habib, a project controls engineer with Saudi Arabian Bechtel on the Riyadh Metro, told Construction Briefing in January 2024: “Engineering is male dominated everywhere. Working in Riyadh is not that different. I’ve worked overseas, I can compare both experiences” [S17]. Both statements can be true, and the registration data does not adjudicate between them.

An allocation problem, not a supply problem

Saudi Arabia does not have too few workers. It has trained workers it is not using, and imported workers doing the work instead.

Three published series make the point together. Expatriates held 14.8 million of the 19.03 million jobs in the Kingdom at the end of 2025 — about 78% of all employment, a higher share than when Saudisation was relaunched [S4]. Saudi women’s participation was 33.9% in Q1 2026, meaning roughly two thirds of adult Saudi women were neither working nor looking [S3]. And the national workforce is still growing: a third of Saudi nationals are under 15, Saudi-national fertility is 2.7 births per woman, and the citizen population expands at about 2% a year, so the domestic pipeline widens into the 2040s [S20].

Those facts are incompatible with a supply story. There is no demographic shortage of Saudi nationals inside the Vision 2030 window; the constraint arrives two decades after it. What exists is a distribution failure, and the Council of Engineers register states it in one line: of 463,773 members in 2023, 282,856 were expatriates and 180,917 Saudi nationals [S21]. Saudi Arabia is running one of the world’s largest construction programmes, staffing it with imported engineering labour, and producing female engineering graduates at the lowest rate in the Gulf. Those are the same problem. See expatriates are 78% of the Saudi workforce and how effective is Saudisation?.

Why this matters for Vision 2030

Because the human-capital case for Vision 2030 rests on converting educational attainment into employment, and for Saudi women STEM graduates the conversion rate is the thing nobody measures.

Vision 2030 hit its original female-participation target years early and adopted a working ambition of 40%; the female labour participation KPI tracks that headline. No published indicator records whether a woman with a physics degree works in physics, or whether an engineering graduate is licensed to practise. The Human Capability Development Programme tracker records inputs — curriculum reform, scholarship reorientation, training volumes — and the participation rate records aggregate attachment to the labour market. The question this analysis is about sits between them.

That gap has a fiscal edge. Saudi Arabia directs roughly 17% of public expenditure to education [S5]; the education spending reference sets out the allocation. A science degree that does not lead to scientific work is a transfer, not an investment. The Kingdom is paying to train women in science at rates among the world’s highest while paying to import the technical labour its projects consume — and female participation, the most-cited social proof point in Vision 2030 communications, is a year into a decline the GASTAT employment data records.

Risks, contradictions and open questions

The engineering figure is a reconstruction, not a published statistic. No agency publishes the female share of engineering graduates for Saudi Arabia. The 12.1% is derived from UNESCO’s own field tables by a method validated three ways and independently reconstructed three times, converging on 12.0–12.1% for 2022. It remains a derivation and is presented as one. Relatedly, the 2024 UNESCO submission does not reconcile with itself, which is why all headline figures here are stated for 2022; if the 2024 data is sound, the engineering share is nearer 14–15% and natural sciences nearer 84%.

The Council of Engineers figure carries a definitional ambiguity. Arab News reports women as 3.19% “of the total number of Saudi engineers and technicians”. We read that as a share of Saudi nationals, consistent with the Council’s series of about 4,300 women in 2021. If it means all 448,528 registrants, the figure would be about 14,300 women and the gap smaller. The Council’s website was unreachable throughout this research and no sex-disaggregated figure has appeared since August 2024.

The two most-quoted employment numbers are unsourced. The “17% of Saudi female STEM graduates work in STEM” claim has no traceable statistical origin. The “35% of the Saudi technology workforce is female” figure originates in Ministry of Communications and Information Technology press material, was carried into the Vision 2030 Annual Report 2024 without a source, then re-cited to that report — a closed loop. It stayed at exactly 35% for four years while its stated denominator grew, and the 2025 annual report drops it.

Causation is not established. The data shows a gap between qualification and practice, and an unemployment gap between men and women holding the same qualification. It does not show whether women are not hired, not applying, leaving after entry, or moving into adjacent roles the occupational categories do not distinguish.

No Saudi national publication reports graduates by field and sex. GASTAT either bundles engineering and computing into a single STEM total or omits sex, which is why the graduate side of this analysis rests on UNESCO rather than on a domestic source. The National Labor Observatory — which the Human Capability Development Programme’s 2025 annual report describes as analysing graduate employment across 55 universities — was unreachable at every address tried on 31 July 2026. Field-to-occupation match therefore remains unmeasured: whether a Saudi physics graduate works as a physicist is not a question the statistical system can answer, and that is the central gap in this analysis rather than a footnote to it.

What to watch next

Saudi Arabia’s next UNESCO submission. A 2025 return would resolve whether the 2024 discontinuity is a reporting artefact or a real break, and give the first post-KFUPM reading on engineering. The women admitted to KFUPM’s bachelor’s programmes in 2021/22 graduate from 2025, and KFUPM reports women at half of engineering admissions, so the graduate share should move sharply within three years — or the institutional explanation fails.

The 25% engineering Saudisation quota, in force since 21 July 2024 for firms employing five or more engineers [S12]. It creates demand for Saudi engineers without specifying gender; whether female registration accelerates against it is a direct test.

Any Saudi Council of Engineers publication carrying sex-disaggregated membership. None has appeared since August 2024.

GASTAT’s Q2 2026 Labour Market bulletin, expected around the end of September 2026. Watch the unemployment-by-field-of-study table rather than the headline rate.

Related Vision 2030 context

• Saudi women’s workforce participation is falling — the quarterly GASTAT series and how it is reported
• Women in the Saudi workforce — the standing pillar analysis of the transformation
• Female employment in Saudi Arabia — definitions, history and sectoral composition
• Female labour participation KPI tracker — the running figure against the 40% ambition
• Female participation across the GCC — regional comparison
• Saudi universities are climbing the rankings, Saudi schools are not — the outcomes divergence behind the pipeline
• Expatriates are 78% of the Saudi workforce — the labour-allocation counterweight
• Saudi Arabia’s fertility rate — why the national workforce keeps growing into the 2040s
• Human Capability Development Programme — the Vision 2030 skills pillar
• Saudisation explained — the nationalisation framework

Sources

• [S1] UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Field-of-Study Indicators for Saudi Arabia and Comparator Countries (FGP.5T8.F500600700, FOSGP.5T8.F500/F600/F700/F900 and related series), UIS public data API and Data Browser, retrieved 31 July 2026. https://databrowser.uis.unesco.org/browser/EDUCATION/UIS-EducationOPRI
• [S2] UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, New UIS Data Show That the Share of Women in STEM Graduates Stagnant for 10 Years, World Education Blog, 25 April 2024. https://world-education-blog.org/2024/04/25/new-uis-data-show-that-the-share-of-women-in-stem-graduates-stagnant-for-10-years/
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