Facebook hires its first Saudi female employee

Samar Abdul Mohsen al-Sultan, who recently graduated from Ireland’s Trinity University, will be taking up a role at Facebook overseeing small and medium enterprises and advising them on how to utilise the social network site to advance their businesses.

In an interview with women’s lifestyle magazine Sayidaty, al-Sultan said she clustered the confidence up from her education, graduating from Ireland’s Trinity University with International Trade and Economics.

At the time of receiving the job offer from Facebook, she received a job offer at Google, but turned it down in favour of Facebook.

Al-Sultan said before she found out she got the job, she took part in seven interviews at the social networking site. 

Despite the praise Facebook is receiving, its overall workforce is disproportionately dominated by men.

Last year, Facebook commended itself after increasing the percentage of women working for the company from 33 percent in 2016 to 35 percent in 2017, with the percentage of women in the technical department rising by two percent from 17 percent to 19 percent.

A Facebook blog post at the time announced that women make up 27 percent of all new graduate hires in engineering and 21 percent of all new technical hires at Facebook.

"We're committed to building a more diverse, inclusive Facebook - and will remain committed. Much like our approach to launching new products on our platform, we are willing to experiment and listen to feedback. We want to highlight three programmes in particular," Maxine Williams, Global Director of Diversity at Facebook said.