THE GUARDIAN: King endorses single-sex campus for 40,000 / Gender-based barrier to study and jobs challenged
The world's largest women-only university is being built in Saudi Arabia; with a campus that will cover 8m square metres and accommodate 40,000 students.
Due to open in 2010, the Princess Noura bint Abdulrahman University, on the outskirts of Riyadh, will offer courses in subjects that Saudi women find difficult to study at universities where gender segregation is enforced.
It will have a library, conference centres, 15 academic faculties, laboratories and a 700-bed hospital. There will be facilities for research into nanotechnology, bio-sciences and information technology.
At the foundation-laying ceremony last week, which was attended by King Abdullah, the finance minister, Ibrahim Al-Assaf, told reporters the site would include housing for university staff, mosques, a school, a kindergarten and theme parks.
Assaf described the project as a "milestone" in the kingdom's history. The higher education minister, Khaled al-Anqari, added: "The king's presence shows his generous support for women's empowerment and his keen desire to promote higher education."
This year Human Rights Watch accused the Saudi government of stopping women from enjoying their basic rights because they must often obtain permission from a guardian - a father, husband or son - to work, travel, study, marry or even access healthcare.
In a 50-page report, Perpetual Minors: Human Rights Abuses Stemming from Male Guardianship and Sex Segregation in Saudi Arabia, researchers drew on more than 100 interviews with Saudi women to document the effects of discriminatory policies.
The findings showed that the need fort women-only spaces was a disincentive to hiring female employees and that female students were often relegated to unequal facilities. >>> Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent | November 1, 2008
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