A Middle Eastern female anchor ignited controversy after appearing without a headscarf during a national news broadcast on a Saudi government-run channel, The Huffington Post reported.
Saleh Al Mughailif, a spokesman for Saudi news channel Al Ekhbariya, said the anchor was delivering her news bulletin out of the London office and that similar incidents would not happen in the future.
"She was not in a studio inside Saudi Arabia and we do not tolerate any transgression of our values and the country's systems," Al Mughailif said.
According to Gulf News, the hijab is more strictly enforced in some parts of the kingdom more than others. It represents modesty, morality and privacy.
Al Ekhbariya made headlines back in 2004 when it introduced the country's first female anchor to deliver the channel's first broadcast, The Independent reports.
A clip of the broadcast was uploaded to YouTube and has been making its rounds on social media platforms. Gulf News notes that women have appeared without headscarves on Saudi television during foreign program airings.
And while some voiced their issue with the news broadcast on Saudi social media, others did not find it so shocking, The Huffington Post reported.
Although women are still not permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia, they have begun to take on more roles in the strict country's gender-segregated society.
In recent years, women have been allowed to work as supermarket cashiers and sales clerks at lingerie and cosmetic shops. King Abdullah Bin Abdul also appointed 30 female members to the country's advisory body, the Shura Council, in 2013 which was seen as a controversial move and a giant leap forward for women.
Rawda al-Jazani, Al Akbaria's head of programming, told Time, "Just the visuals of seeing women sitting in the Shura, with their faces uncovered, making equal decisions with men, that alone will make women in authority more acceptable to society."
