Work Participation of Currently Married Women in Pakistan: Influence of Socio-Economic and Demographic Factors

The study of trends and structure of female labour forceparticipation in -developing countries has attracted considerableattention over the past few years. Several international comparisonsbased on religious as well as socio-cultural and demographicdifferentials have been made. See, for example, Youssef [23, 24 and 25],Denti [6] and Boserup [4]. The primary focus of most of such studiesconsists of analysing female labour force participation rates andstructure by controlling for one or two background factors like age orfamily structure. Fong's study [9] of West Malaysian women seems to beone of the few studies that have concentrated on analysing in a detailedand exhaustive manner the social and economic correlates of female workparticipation. Among the studies relating to labour force participationof Pakistani women, historical trends (Farooq [7]), structural set up(Farooq [8] and Bean |1 and 2]), and socio-cultural factors (Papanek[15], Pastner [16] and Saeed "[17]) have been analysed. Attempts havealso been made at studying the cor¬relates of labour forceparticipation, both for males and females [26 and 8].1 These studieshave been referred to in the following sections wherever felt relevant.