Ivanka Trump brought her message of female empowerment Sunday to the world’s most repressive society for women, a place where women are not allowed to drive, must cover themselves from head to toe in public and require permission from a “male guardian” to travel outside their homes.

“In every country, including the United States, women and girls face challenges,” Trump told a small group of accomplished Saudi women gathered for a dialogue with her about how to build on their successes. “Saudi Arabia’s progress, especially in recent years, is very encouraging,” she said, “but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

President Trump is also accompanied here by his wife, Melania, and she and Ivanka Trump have often been the only women present in public meetings with Saudi officials. The first lady, who was courteous but silent and largely without expression during a number of formal sessions Saturday, was praised Sunday by the English-language Arab News as “classy and conservative” for her demeanor and designer outfits, covering her arms and legs.

Neither Melania nor Ivanka Trump have worn headscarves during the visit, following the tradition of other presidential spouses who visited Saudi Arabia.

[Melania and Ivanka Trump, following tradition of Western visitors, forgo headscarves in Saudi Arabia]

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Beyond the streets of this country’s locked-down capital, social media has been filled with both flattering and not-so-positive comments about the Trump family, including cartoons of the president picking Arab pockets as he shakes hands with royal leaders and memes of him in an imam’s beard beside racy photos from days when he owned the Miss Universe competition.

One cartoon showed the Statue of Liberty dolefully sitting with her chin on her fist — an apparent reference to the president’s entry ban affecting six majority-Muslim countries, although not Saudi Arabia — while Trump dances a jig, holding aloft a torch spewing American warplanes.

In her meeting with the women, Ivanka Trump described herself as a “female leader within the Trump administration” and said her focus was “to help empower women in the United States and around the globe.”

She noted problems of affordable child care, paid family leave and a “persistent pay gap,” and she said women around the world have told her of their lack of access to capital, networks and markets.

The 15 black-wrapped women gathered at Riyadh’s Tuwaiq Palace to speak with the first daughter, who was dressed in a powder-blue pantsuit, were all highly educated, many of them in the United States. They held a variety of positions: heads of a national youth organization and the first public women-only university in the kingdom, senior roles in the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the small-business authority, and company founders.

[Ivanka Trump moves into West Wing office, acknowledges ‘no modern precedent’ for her role]

Hosting the meeting was Princess Reema bint Bandar, head of the women’s section of the General Authority of Sports, who said she had met Trump because both had a life in retail. “And today,” the princess said, “we both find ourselves quite interestingly in governmental positions where we hope to make a difference for the future of women.”

(The Washington Post)

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, the only man at the gathering, described Trump and the princess as “two incredibly successful entrepreneurs” and praised the development of the International Women’s Empowerment Fund under “Ivanka’s leadership.” He said that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have together contributed $100 million and that he expected to announce a total of $1 billion in the fund — used to help female entrepreneurs — at the Group of 20 summit in July.

Kim called it “a stunning achievement.” The German government has been deeply involved in the effort, and the World Bank has increased its involvement after critics suggested that any role for Trump in soliciting funds would conflict with her White House role.

Saudi women need permission from male guardians for life choices. Will reforms change this?

Although two female reporters present were not permitted to stay past the introductory remarks, a White House official later said they discussed segregation of men and women in the kingdom, guardianship laws, and the ban on women driving.

Throughout the president’s two-day visit to the kingdom, neither he nor any other U.S. official has publicly mentioned human rights here, although he briefly mentioned women’s empowerment in his keynote speech to Muslim leaders Sunday. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in a Saturday news conference, did not respond to a question about whether human rights was raised in private talks.

In its most recent assessment of human rights around the world, the State Department noted that reported problems in Saudi Arabia included “citizens’ lack of the ability and legal means to choose their government; restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the Internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement, and religion; and pervasive gender discrimination and lack of equal rights that affected most aspects of women’s lives.”

Trump’s message did not appear to resonate with at least some Saudi women.

“All the women that Ivanka Trump met have a guardian,” said Aziza al-Yousef, a 58-year-old Saudi activist who has campaigned to abolish the guardianship rules. A retired computer science professor at King Saud University, she was recently rebuffed when she tried to deliver to the government a 14,700-signature petition on eliminating the guardian system.

“All these achievements depend on whether you’re lucky to be born in a family where your guardian will be understanding, will help you,” Yousef said. “If Ivanka is interested in women empowerment and human rights, she should see activists, and not just officials.”

[A Saudi woman tweeted a photo of herself without a hijab. Police arrested her.]

A recent royal decree called for easing some aspects of the guardian system, which requires a father, brother, husband or other close relative to accompany women outside the home and give written consent for them to access higher education, jobs and health care. The decree, which gave agencies three months to come up with new rules, does not include the right for women to travel independently outside the country.

“It’s not about Ivanka speaking at the meeting,” said activist Loujain al-Hathloul, “but is it actually useful for these women from Saudi Arabia to speak as well? Is their contribution in such events helpful to us Saudi women in general, not princesses or business owners or rich women? Does it actually help us? I doubt it.

“For instance, Princess Reema has her own business; she’s hiring a lot of Saudi women,” Hathloul said. “Thank you for this.” But as a member of the global advisory board for Uber, “she hasn’t pushed for women to drive,” the activist said.

[Saudi Arabia creates a girls council to empower women — but where are the girls?]

Hathloul, 27, was jailed in 2014 for daring to drive in Saudi Arabia, an event she chronicled on social media. “I haven’t tried since then,” she said, noting that she has a Persian Gulf-wide license that allows her to drive in every other country on the Arabian Peninsula.

“My issue with these events,” she said of Ivanka Trump’s discussion, “is that they show these women as powerful and making an impact, making a change. But in real life, they’ve been given these opportunities by the men. They did not fight for them.”

“We are fighting to abolish the guardianship system. Have they taken part in it?” Hathloul said about what she called “the biggest wall in front of Saudi women.” The businesswomen in the group, she said, “did something to reach that level, they worked for it. . . . But what are they doing in real life to change the laws that are restricting women from actually developing themselves?”

“Can I ever be one of those women?” she said.

This story has been updated to correct the anticipated amount of total contributions to the Women’s Empowerment Fund. It is expected to reach $1 billion not $41 billion.

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