This paper explores the question of how the Saudi state is utilizing gendered initiatives and representations to fulfill its political agendas and reinforce the political and social power of male rulers. I engage with the scholarship of Madawi Al-Rasheed (2013) and Amelie Le Renard (2014), particularly their understandings of the relationship between the Saudi state and its national female population. I apply Al-Rasheed’s (2013) framing of Saudi Arabia as a “masculine state” and its representation of women as “symbols of modernity” to my analysis of the state’s recent reforms, demonstrating in particular how the state is simultaneously representing its gender reforms to an international audience as a marker of “modernity” and reinforcing patriarchal power relations at the state and societal levels. My research contributes to current scholarship in its analysis of the Saudi state’s recent gender reforms and the ways they exemplify the relationship between the Saudi state and Saudi women, as well as my examination of state discourses propagated by the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. I argue that the gendered discourses and initiatives of the Saudi state are founded upon representations of women and their advancement in society as symbols of modernity and reform. However, I contend that while the state’s reforms claim to advance women’s status in society, they are developed to fulfill the agendas of a masculine state and implemented in a manner that reinforces patriarchal power structures and obscures the voices of Saudi women themselves. In order to demonstrate how the state is simultaneously representing women as symbols of modernity and reinforcing patriarchal power structures, I analyze the state’s recent gender reforms as well as the state’s regulation of women through the guardianship system. Specifically, I analyze the gender reforms initiated under the leadership of Mohammed Bin Salman and the discourses embodied in a number of the prince’s interviews with Western media outlets. In addition, I outline some of the demands of Saudi women activists that challenge the state’s conceptualizations of women’s advancement in society.