Saudi Arabia brings new reform, ends gender segregation in restaurants

In its recent reform, Saudi Arabia has ended gender-based segregation in restaurants. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had brought the recent reform under the leadership of Mohammed bin Salman, who took over the charge from his father in 2017. The recent reform allows restaurants in the oil-rich country to remove screens that were separating men and women in public eateries. 

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Until recently, Saudi Arabia required restaurants to have separate entrances for women with families and a different entrance divided by a screen for men on their own. The government of Saudi Arabia has said that restaurants will no longer require to have separate entrances segregated by sex. Many restaurants have already started practicing the new reform as cafes and other meeting places no longer have screens segregating genders. 

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Saudi Arabia recently brought many social reforms

Saudi Arabia has recently brought some social reforms that have earned the Kingdom praise from international communities. Earlier this year, the royal country allowed its women to travel abroad without any male guardian. Earlier, women in the Kingdom required a male custodian to travel abroad. In 2018, Saudi Arabia ended a driving ban on women after which many of them were seen on the roads celebrating the reform. On October 9, 2019, Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Defence announced that women will be allowed to serve in the armed forces. The ministry notified that women will be allowed to hold ranks of the first soldier, corporal, deputy sergeant and sergeant in the branches of Royal Land forces, air force, and navy. 

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Despite Mohammed bin Salman's move to bring many social reforms, the country's repressing actions in the recent past have also brought them under the scanner. In 2018, the Kingdom faced a lot of backlash from the western world for its alleged involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi, an avid critic of the royal family was living in the United States at the time of the murder and had visited Turkey to get his papers done.

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