Government | Sunday 7 January, 2018 11:38 am |

The General Authority for Statistics (GaStat) has reported that 10.3 percent of women in the Kingdom beyond the ideal marriage age remained spinsters in 2017, Al-Madina newspaper reported.

The GaStat report said 230,512 women out of 2.2 million aged above 32 years remained unmarried in the year 2017.

It meant that one in every 10 women in Saudi Arabia are unmarried. The ideal marriage age in the Kingdom for women is considered to be between 15 and 32 years.

The report showed 2.83 percent of women got married at the age of 32 years. It said 33 percent of all unmarried women in the country are in the age group of 15-32 years.

It said 58.8 percent of the women in the same age group are married, 5.6 percent are widowed and 2.5 percent are divorced.

The report also showed that 42 percent of Saudi men above 15 years are unmarried while 56.3 of them are, 0.5 percent of them are widowed and 1.2 percent divorced.

The lowest ratio of unmarried women in the age group of 15-32 years was in Baha with 25.57 percent. Qassim had the highest ratio with 35.48 percent.

The average age of men at the time of their first time marriage was 25.3 years while the average age for women was 20.4 years.

The report said 46 percent of women got married for the first time when they were below 20 years.

The ratio of women who got married between the ages 25 and 29 was 26.7 percent while it was 35 percent for the age group of 30-34 years.