Women now hold 36 percent of Saudi technology jobs

Women account for 36 percent of Saudi Arabia's technology workforce, a figure set out as LEAP 2026 opened in Riyadh and described by the event's organisers as the highest share among G20 countries. It arrived packaged with the economic numbers LEAP uses to measure itself. The Kingdom's digital economy has grown 69 percent since the show's first edition, from $118 billion to $199 billion, and the opening day carried more than $15 billion in technology investments and strategic commitments. Of the three figures, the workforce one says the most about whether the other two can be sustained. It is worth being precise about what a headline percentage like this establishes and what it does not. Thirty-six percent is a share of headcount in a sector. It is not a statement about seniority, pay, technical versus non-technical roles, or how many of those jobs sit in engineering rather than in the administrative and commercial functions that every technology employer also runs. None of that breakdown was published alongside the number, and the definition of "technology workforce" being used — whether it covers the ICT sector as classified by the labour ministry, or technology roles across the whole economy — changes the answer materially. The G20 comparison carries the same caveat and should be read as the organisers' claim rather than an independently verified ranking. Countries count technology employment differently, and cross-country comparisons of sectoral gender shares are notoriously sensitive to which occupations are folded in. What can be said without qualification is that the trajectory is unusual: a national technology sector that barely employed women a decade ago now reports more than a third of its workforce as female, and reports it as a headline statistic rather than a footnote. The mechanism behind that shift is not mysterious. It is a combination of legal changes to women's labour-market participation, a state-funded training apparatus that has aimed programmes at women specifically, and a sector expanding fast enough that it has had to recruit from everywhere at once. Saudi Arabia's technology employers have spent the past several years competing for staff in a market where demand consistently outran the local supply of qualified people, and the arithmetic of that shortage has done as much for female participation as any policy. That expansion is visible across this week's programme. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development used the show to launch an AI Arabia Center of Excellence aimed at the existing labour market rather than at students, and operators have been signing training agreements of their own: Zain KSA and Nokia turned their LEAP partnership towards workforce development . The startup floor tells a version of the same story, where investors managing $14.3 trillion are assessing companies whose main constraint is usually people rather than capital. The number to watch next is not this one. It is the share of women in the roles that pay most and decide most — engineering leadership, founding teams, technical management — and whether the organisations quoting 36 percent are prepared to publish it. A participation figure measures who got in the door. It says nothing yet about who is running the room. Neither LEAP nor the ministries presenting the figure published the underlying dataset or the year it was measured, so the comparison with previous editions of the show cannot be made from public sources. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.