It’s not illegal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia but it is illegal for them to drive without a Saudi license. And licenses aren’t issued to women. The embargo is purely cultural. A combination of deeply embedded tradition and a powerful religious establishment ensures that progress in the desert kingdom happens slowly.
The numerous anti-driving arguments put forward by conservatives who fear change have no foundation in common sense. This was most famously demonstrated by the cleric Sheikh Saleh Al Lohaidan who warned women that “physiological science” shows that driving “automatically affects the ovaries and pushes up the pelvis … and that is why children born to most women who continuously drive suffer from clinical disorders of varying degrees”.