In December, women in Saudi Arabia will run for public office and vote for the first time. In theory, that should count as an advance for female empowerment in this ultraconservative country, but the reality is more ambiguous.

Nassima al-Sadah, a prominent human rights advocate and a leader of the movement to allow women to drive, has declared her candidacy for a municipal council seat (the only positions women may run for), set up a campaign committee and held workshops to encourage other women to get involved. “Men have to know that women must sit beside them in every decision-making and that their voices should be heard,” she said when I visited her home recently in Qatif in the Eastern province.

So far, though, of the 4.5 million eligible female voters, only 132,000 registered by the cutoff date and about 1,000 women are running as candidates, compared with 6,428 men.

“It’s a token, a step toward women’s full citizenship,” admitted Dr. Hatoon Alfassi, a university professor and leading women’s rights campaigner from Riyadh. Still, she is encouraged because “a good number of women are willing to break lots of taboos in order to reach out” and to withstand threats against them on social media by Saudis who believe women have no place in politics.

Yet many women I met in Saudi Arabia, most of them well educated and under 50, said they did not plan to vote.

One businesswoman said she was working in Paris and couldn’t get back to her assigned polling location by the registration deadline. A group of sophisticated 20-somethings I met in Riyadh confessed to being more interested in developing video games than in electoral politics. Even a well-known media personality and activist, Muna AbuSulayman, won’t be casting a ballot. She was overseas during the registration period and couldn’t get the paperwork together to register from afar.

There are many barriers to women’s participation. For one thing, the municipal councils, which approve budgets and oversee urban development projects, don’t have much real power, activists said, which makes voting seem less urgent and meaningful.

The government did a poor job informing women about registration procedures and opened too few registration stations. It set up absurd rules for campaigning — female candidates in this gender-segregated society are barred from attending campaign events where men are present and from contacting them on social media.

— New York Times News Service