Instead, the key challenge stemmed from traditional male views that women should marry and stay at home while men work. Another possible barrier is the competition for scarce jobs for both genders.
Conducted by Saudi and Austrian social scientists over 2007-2008, the first mass poll of Saudi university students assessed the barriers to employment for women, who are graduating in greater numbers than males but not finding jobs.
"Everything they do, it all comes down to gender," said Fawziah al-Bakr, a King Saud University education professor and one of the study's authors.
With a high unemployment rate among young Saudis, the oil-rich country needs to generate more jobs and women university students want to compete for those jobs, said Bakr, one of the country's most prominent women's rights advocates.
Saudi women now view university education as a step toward work, and not just as education for its own sake ahead of marriage and raising children, she said in a Riyadh presentation of the study this week.
"They want to realize their full potential and strive in the public sphere: paid employment is a new priority for young female Saudi students," the study says.
It showed about 80 percent of women seek the same opportunities as men and aim to compete in their fields. But over half of men were opposed, with only 22 percent agreed that women should be able to compete head-to-head with men.
However, nearly two-thirds of male university students had a positive view of their female counterparts going to work after graduation.
"This is important, for male acceptance is generally the prerequisite for female job occupation. Male allowance is the female entrance ticket into the world of employment," the study's authors wrote.
Both genders were uncertain of any substantial changes to women's rights in Saudi Arabia over the next five years. Only 44 percent of women were confident, with another 36 percent mildly hopeful.
Meanwhile, only 26 percent of men were strongly confident that such change would take place.
"A person who considers the changes in gender roles necessary is also more likely to predict that these changes will actually occur," the survey said.
Neither gender linked women's moves into the job market as contrary to the ultra-strict version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.
Asked if this would undermine Saudi religious practices, only 24 percent of men and eight percent of women said yes.
The poll shows that women themselves are hesitant about pushing their way into the top ranks of an entirely male-dominated society, with only eight percent agreeing that women should take political leadership roles.
Government leadership is totally male, with the exception of a woman deputy minister of education, appointed this year, the first-ever female with ministerial rank.
Women account for almost two-thirds of university graduates but only seven percent of the Saudi work force.
"The female talent pool is taking over in terms of numbers and qualifications," said Edit Schlaffer, the chair of Women Without Borders, a Vienna-based women's advocacy group which supported the study.
Guided by a strict interpretation of Islamic teachings, Saudi society has some of the world's toughest controls on women.
Women cannot drive, must have a male relative's permission and company when moving outside the home, and are banned from mixing with unrelated males, whether in universities or government or private sector offices.
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