Discrimination in the Pakistan Labour Market: Myth and Reality

This paper examines what author calls a fundamental form of sex discrimination in Pakistan: the fact that women's extensive participation in the labor force is ignored by economic planners. While wage and job discrimination are the most common forms of sex discrimination in Europe and North America, in Pakistan sex discrimination revolves around the divergence between the myth that women do not work and the reality that women's labor force participation is high. Because of the myth that women do not work, women are overlooked by the same planning process that could serve to enhance their productivity. The paper is divided into 5 sections: 1) the introduction; 2) an examination of the myth concerning women's labor force participation and its underlying reasons; 3) an analysis of the extent of women's participation in the labor force in rural and urban settings; 4) a discussion of the extent of wage and occupational discrimination in Pakistan; and 5) a discussion of the policy implications. While official figures calculate the labor force activity of rural women and urban women to be between 3%-10.7% and 3.5%-4.7%, respectively, the author explains that the figures are closer to 55% and 25% (and this does not include women's participation in the informal sector). The author identifies 4 reasons that perpetuate the myth that women do not work: 1) women are physically hidden from view, a seclusion institutionalized by the practice of purdah (the veil); 2) the middle-class ideal of a nonworking wife; 3) the perception that only paid labor counts as work; and 4) the failure of statistics to capture the true extent of women's participation.