Saudi Arabian Women’s right are limited in comparison to those of men, and in comparison to women in other countries.

The World Economic Forum's 2016 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 141 out of 144 countries for gender parity.

Female representation in the Saudi Arabian workplace has started to happen, but it is still in its infancy in terms of numbers and ratio. The workforce is heavily male-dominated, and women find it difficult to break in.

Women in Saudi Arabia constituted just 13% of the country's native workforce in 2015. The figure is now at 22%.

The Saudi Arabian government announced an ambition of increasing the participation of Saudi women in the workforce from 22% to 30% by 2030.

Unfortunately, Saudi isn’t yet moving in tandem with the government’s goals. So, while women employability is a priority, addressing the issue is seen as controversial and out of step with the reality of the country.

Additionally, traditional Saudi Arabian culture values female humility, so placing pictures of women on platforms like LinkedIn is not the norm.

A campaign that breaks the code and normalizes the representation of women is important for visibility and moving the needle forward.

Our idea was to use LinkedIn data to rectify the subjective narrative and to tell real stories, from professional women, thereby affirming their potential and giving them a voice via LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s mission is to match talent with opportunity and there was a great need to do EXACTLY that in Saudi.

First, we conducted an in-depth research which exposed some fascinating contradictions relating to female employment.

Using this data, we created the “Hear it from me” (#HearItFromMe) campaign, turning LinkedIn into a platform that amplified the voices of Saudi career women, making them visible to recruiters and public, via online film, social media, interview and more.

We delivered training to women and employers, giving people tools to take action in the real world, enabling real change.

The campaign encouraged companies in Saudi to re-evaluate their hiring practices and well as inspiring widespread conversation on earned, owned, social and mainstream media.

Our strategy was to channel & align LinkedIn’s efforts with their human capital ambitions by getting professional Saudi women to sign up to LinkedIn & understand how the platform supports their careers & professional needs.

We leveraged this insight: Saudi women reject the negative narrative deeming them unavailable or unready & seize every opportunity to voice their opinion and show their capabilities.

The target audience was both female professionals and Saudi Arabian employers.

Since female employability is a high priority on the national agenda, and controversial, we knew LinkedIn being vocal and having career women talk about their challenges would earn the media attention.

Discussing the campaign research on Al Arabiya (a most viewed talk show),and feeding the story in to social media with LinkedIn’s first ever female Saudi employee, led to huge amplification.

• 100K new sign ups during the campaign quarter, bringing the total Linkedin membership in Saudi to 3M

• Linkedin’s platform generated over 548K impressions and over 13K clicks, which exceeded the engagement rate benchmark (0.65%) on the platform by 457%

• 35% increase in perceptions associating LinkedIn with career progression among Saudi females

• The campaign broke records on social media and earned more coverage than previous Linkedin campaigns in MENA.

• Twitter engagement rate = 6.5% (regional benchmark is 3%) with over 60K engagements.

• Facebook engagement rate = 10.6% (regional benchmark is 5%) with over 70K engagements.

• 40 pieces of EARNED coverage across tier-1 dailies, broadcast and trade publications.

• Total media reach of 49M impressions and an ad value of more than $160K

• LinkedIn received countless collaboration requests from companies and was viewed as a partner in finding and attracting female talent