Pakistan's Saadia Zahidi Leads World Economic Forum's Gender Parity Effort

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistan-born, Harvard-educated economist Ms. Saadia Zahidi, author of "50 Million Rising", is currently a member of the executive committee and the head of Education, Gender and Work at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland. She told Kai Ryssdal of APR Marketplace of her visit to a gas field in Pakistan with her geophysicist father where she met Nazia, a woman engineer who inspired her.

Saadia Zahidi

The "50 Million" in the title of her book refers to the 50 million Muslim women who have joined the work force over the last 15 years bringing the total number of working women in the Muslim world to about 155 million.

In her book, Saadia talks about her father being the first in his family to go to university. He believed in girls' education and career opportunities. She recalls him suggesting that "my sister could become a pilot because the Pakistan Air Force had just starting to train women. Another time he speculated that I could become a news anchor because Pakistan Television, the state-owned television network, had started recruiting more women".  Here's an excerpt of her book:

"This shift has not been limited to Pakistan. A quiet but powerful tsunami of working women has swept across the Muslim world. In all, 155 million women work in the Muslim world today, and fifty million of them--a full third--have joined the work force since the turn of the millennium alone, a formidable migration from home to work in the span of less than a generation".

Saadia Zahidi has devoted parts of her book to her experiences in Pakistan where she visited a McDonald's restaurant and found many women working there. A woman also named Saadia working at McDonald's restaurant in Rawalpindi is featured in the book. Here's an excerpt:

"For young women like Saadia, seeing their efforts rewarded in the workplace, just as they were in school and university, can be eye-opening and thrilling and lead them to become even more motivated to work. The independent income is an almost unexpected bonus. I asked Saadia how she spends her earnings and whether she saves. She gives 30 percent of her income to her parents, she said, and the rest she spends as she pleases: mostly on gifts to her parents, sisters, and friends as well as on lunches and dinners out with friends and gadgets like her cell phone—all new luxuries for her. She said that she has no interest in saving because her parents take care of housing and food, just as she expects her husband will do after she marries. So her disposable income is wholly hers to spend, allowing her to contribute to the household budget while also buying luxuries that were previously unimaginable for her parents, without adding a burden to them."

Challenging the stereotypes about Muslim women, Saadia cites an interesting statistic: In Saudi Arabia, out of all of the women that could be going to university, 50 percent are. And that is higher than in China, in India, in Mexico, in Brazil.

I wrote a post titled "Working Women Seeding a Silent Revolution in Pakistan" in 2011. It's reproduced below in full:

While Fareed Zakaria, Nick Kristoff and other talking heads are still stuck on the old stereotypes of Muslim women, the status of women in Muslim societies is rapidly changing, and there is a silent social revolution taking place with rising number of women joining the workforce and moving up the corporate ladder in Pakistan.



"More of them(women) than ever are finding employment, doing everything from pumping gasoline and serving burgers at McDonald’s to running major corporations", says a report in the latest edition of Businessweek magazine.



Beyond company or government employment, there are a number of NGOs focused on encouraging self-employment and entrepreneurship among Pakistani women by offering skills training and microfinancing. Kashf Foundation led by a woman CEO and BRAC are among such NGOs. They all report that the success and repayment rate among female borrowers is significantly higher than among male borrowers.



In rural Sindh, the PPP-led government is empowering women by granting over 212,864 acres of government-owned agriculture land to landless peasants in the province. Over half of the farm land being given is prime nehri (land irrigated by canals) farm land, and the rest being barani or rain-dependent. About 70 percent of the 5,800 beneficiaries of this gift are women. Other provincial governments, especially the Punjab government have also announced land allotment for women, for which initial surveys are underway, according to ActionAid Pakistan.



Both the public and private sectors are recruiting women in Pakistan's workplaces ranging from Pakistani military, civil service, schools, hospitals, media, advertising, retail, fashion industry, publicly traded companies, banks, technology companies, multinational corporations and NGOs, etc.



Here are some statistics and data that confirm the growth and promotion of women in Pakistan's labor pool:

1. A number of women have moved up into the executive positions, among them Unilever Foods CEO Fariyha Subhani, Engro Fertilizer CFO Naz Khan, Maheen Rahman CEO of IGI Funds and Roshaneh Zafar Founder and CEO of Kashf Foundation.

2. Women now make up 4.6% of board members of Pakistani companies, a tad lower than the 4.7% average in emerging Asia, but higher than 1% in South Korea, 4.1% in India and Indonesia, and 4.2% in Malaysia, according to a February 2011 report on women in the boardrooms.

3. Female employment at KFC in Pakistan has risen 125 percent in the past five years, according to a report in the NY Times.

4. The number of women working at McDonald’s restaurants and the supermarket behemoth Makro has quadrupled since 2006.



5. There are now women taxi drivers in Pakistan. Best known among them is Zahida Kazmi described by the BBC as "clearly a respected presence on the streets of Islamabad".



6. Several women fly helicopters and fighter jets in the military and commercial airliners in the state-owned and private airlines in Pakistan.

Here are a few excerpts from the recent Businessweek story written by Naween Mangi:

About 22 percent of Pakistani females over the age of 10 now work, up from 14 percent a decade ago, government statistics show. Women now hold 78 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly, and in July, Hina Rabbani Khar, 34, became Pakistan’s first female Foreign Minister. “The cultural norms regarding women in the workplace have changed,” says Maheen Rahman, 34, chief executive officer at IGI Funds, which manages some $400 million in assets. Rahman says she plans to keep recruiting more women for her company.

Much of the progress has come because women stay in school longer. More than 42 percent of Pakistan’s 2.6 million high school students last year were girls, up from 30 percent 18 years ago. Women made up about 22 percent of the 68,000 students in Pakistani universities in 1993; today, 47 percent of Pakistan’s 1.1 million university students are women, according to the Higher Education Commission. Half of all MBA graduates hired by Habib Bank, Pakistan’s largest lender, are now women. “Parents are realizing how much better a lifestyle a family can have if girls work,” says Sima Kamil, 54, who oversees 1,400 branches as head of retail banking at Habib. “Every branch I visit has one or two girls from conservative backgrounds,” she says.

Some companies believe hiring women gives them a competitive advantage. Habib Bank says adding female tellers has helped improve customer service at the formerly state-owned lender because the men on staff don’t want to appear rude in front of women. And makers of household products say female staffers help them better understand the needs of their customers. “The buyers for almost all our product ranges are women,” says Fariyha Subhani, 46, CEO of Unilever Pakistan Foods, where 106 of the 872 employees are women. “Having women selling those products makes sense because they themselves are the consumers,” she says.

To attract more women, Unilever last year offered some employees the option to work from home, and the company has run an on-site day-care center since 2003. Engro, which has 100 women in management positions, last year introduced flexible working hours, a day-care center, and a support group where female employees can discuss challenges they encounter. “Today there is more of a focus at companies on diversity,” says Engro Fertilizer CFO Khan, 42. The next step, she says, is ensuring that “more women can reach senior management levels.”

The gender gap in South Asia remains wide, and women in Pakistan still face significant obstacles. But there is now a critical mass of working women at all levels showing the way to other Pakistani women.

I strongly believe that working women have a very positive and transformational impact on society by having fewer children, and by investing more time, money and energies for better nutrition, education and health care of their children. They spend 97 percent of their income and savings on their families, more than twice as much as men who spend only 40 percent on their families, according to Zainab Salbi, Founder, Women for Women International, who recently appeared on CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria.

Here's an interesting video titled "Redefining Identity" about Pakistan's young technologists, including women, posted by Lahore-based 5 Rivers Technologies:



Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Status of Women in Pakistan

Microfinancing in Pakistan

Gender Gap Worst in South Asia

Status of Women in India

Female Literacy Lags in South Asia

Land For Landless Women

Are Women Better Off in Pakistan Today?

Growing Insurgency in Swat

Religious Leaders Respond to Domestic Violence

Fighting Agents of Intolerance

A Woman Speaker: Another Token or Real Change

A Tale of Tribal Terror

Mukhtaran Mai-The Movie

World Economic Forum Survey of Gender Gap

[Riaz Haq]

#Karachi-based #Pakistani Physician Dr Anita Zaidi appointed President of #GenderEquality at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She has also served as director of #Vaccine Development, Surveillance, and Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases programs. https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/671634-dr-anita-zaidi-appointed-a...

Pakistani Physician Dr Anita Zaidi has been appointed as the new president Gender Equality at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In a remarkable feat for Pakistan, Zaidi is now a part of the Executive leadership team (ELT), included among the six other foundation presidents.


Zaidi has also served as the director of the Vaccine Development, Surveillance, and Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases programs at Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation.

"Her team’s work is focused on vaccine development for people in the poorest parts of the world, surveillance to identify and address causes of death in children in the most under-served areas, and significantly reducing the adverse consequences of diarrheal and enteric infections on children’s health in low and middle-income countries," read the text on the official site of Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation.

Anita obtained her medical degree from the Aga Khan University in Karachi, residency training in pediatrics and fellowship training in medical microbiology from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

She undertook further training in pediatric infectious diseases from Boston’s Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Masters in Tropical Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

"In 2013 Anita became the first recipient of the $1 million Caplow Children’s Prize for work in one of Karachi’s poverty-stricken fishing communities to save children’s lives. She was nominated as a notable physician of the year in 2014 by Medscape," read the website.

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistan-born #scientist becomes first woman & #Pakistani to head biology and medicine section at Max Planck Society, #Germany’s most prestigious research body. It has 18 #Nobel laureates to its credit, at par with the best research institutions worldwide. https://www.dawn.com/news/1569093

KARACHI: ​Pakistan-born scientist ​​​​​​​​Asifa Akhtar has become the first international female vice president of the biology and medicine section at Germany’s prestigious Max Planck Society.

The Max Planck Society is Germany’s most successful research organisation. Since its establishment in 1948, no fewer than 18 Nobel laureates have emerged from the ranks of its scientists, putting it on a par with the best and most prestigious research institutions worldwide.

During her term of office, Ms Akhtar will be in charge of the institutes of the sections and will also be the contact person for the Max Planck Schools.

“My heart beats for the young scientists,” the society’s website quoted Akhtar as saying.

“Academic science is a beautiful example of integration because you have people from all over the world exchanging knowledge beyond boundaries, cultures or prejudice,” she told the society in an interview.

As the vice president, Ms Akhtar also wants to advance the issue of gender equality. “Gender equality needs to be worked on continuously. There are outstanding women in science and we should make all the efforts and use our resources to win them for the Max Planck Society,” she said.

To enable gender diversity in various career domains, she said, the society needed to be more accommodating and understanding. “If we want women to progress in science, we need to enable practical solutions such as childcare and time-sharing or home office options,” she added.

Born in Karachi, she obtained her doctorate at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, UK, in 1997.

She then moved to Germany, where she was a Postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and the Adolf-Butenandt-Institute in Munich from 1998 to 2001.

Ms Akhtar was awarded the Early Career European Life Science Organisation Award in 2008, EMBO membership in 2013, and the Feldberg Prize in 2017. She was also elected as a member of the National Academy of Science Leopoldina in 2019.

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistani #women break dating taboos on #Tinder. Though casual #dating for women is still frowned upon in socially conservative & heavily patriarchal Pakistan, attitudes are rapidly changing in the country's cities. #Karachi #Lahore #Islamabad #Pakistan https://www.dw.com/en/pakistan-women-tinder/a-54509792


Casual dating for women is often frowned upon in Pakistan's male-dominated society. However, dating apps such as Tinder are challenging norms and allowing women to take more control over their sexuality.

Faiqa is a 32-year-old entrepreneur in Islamabad, and, like many young single women around the world, she uses dating apps to connect with men.

Although casual dating for women is still frowned upon in socially conservative and heavily patriarchal Pakistan, attitudes are rapidly changing in the country's cities.

Faiqa has been using the dating app Tinder for two years, and she said although the experience has been "liberating," many Pakistani men are not used to the idea of women taking control of their sexuality and dating lives. Pakistani women are often expected to preserve a family's "honor."

"I've met some men on Tinder who describe themselves as 'open minded feminists,' yet still ask me: 'Why is a decent and educated girl like you on a dating app?'" Faiqa told DW.


Online dating grows in South Asia

India leads South Asia's online dating market, and Pakistan is slowly catching on. A study by the Indonesian Journal of Communication Studies found that most of Pakistan's Tinder users come from major cities including Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi and are usually between 18 and 40 years old.

Other dating apps are also growing in popularity. MuzMatch caters exclusively to Muslims looking for a date. Bumble, despite being relatively new to the online dating market, is a favorite among many Pakistani feminists, as women initiate the first conversation.

"There are fewer men on Bumble, therefore it somehow feels safer to use. Tinder is well-known and someone you know could see you, making it uncomfortable," said Nimra, a student from Lahore.

However, many young women in Pakistan use apps because it makes dating more private.

"With a dating app, a woman can choose if she wants a discreet one night stand, a fling, a long-term relationship etc. It is hard for women to do this openly in our culture, which is why dating apps give them an opportunity they won't find elsewhere," said Nabiha Meher Shaikh, a feminist activist from Lahore.

Exploring sexuality in a conservative society

Sophia, a26-year old researcher from Lahore, told DW she uses Tinder to explore her "sexuality without constraints."

"I don't care if people judge me. Society will always judge you, so why bother trying to please them?" she said.

However, not all female Tinder users are as open as Sophia. Most Tinder profiles of Pakistani women do not disclose their full identity, with photographs showing only cropped faces, close-up shots of hands or feet, faces covered with hair or only painted fingernails.

"If we put up our real names or photographs, most men tend to stalk us. If we don't respond, they find us on social media and send weird messages," said 25-year-old Alishba from Lahore.

She also pointed out dating double standards, explaining that married men on Tinder often use their "broken" marriage as an excuse to date other women.

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistan-born Ayesha read economics at Harvard University and later moved to New York City to pursue a career in Wall Street. She says, “In my field of work, being in Singapore makes a lot of sense. The country believes that for future economic growth, it needs to invest in technology. It is also a great gateway to the fastest growing markets in Asia and because it is a smaller country, any start-up here is international from day one because the mentality is to go out there and be an adventurer.”

https://sg.asiatatler.com/society/parag-ayesha-khanna-on-travel-tec...


More than building a business empire, Ayesha, who is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils, emphasises the importance of the human element in her work. “When I was younger, I worked in the area of human rights so I have always had a human-centred approach to using and living with technology,” says the 46-year-old, who also serves on the board of Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority.

Her father was a civil servant in Pakistan and improving the lives of people was a big topic of conversation when she was a child, she explains. “I believe that the true purpose of AI is to amplify human potential. For example, with the coronavirus affecting schools and interrupting student journeys, how can we use AI to better teach students through personalised learning? Or in healthcare, how can AI assist doctors in their diagnosis or help assistants work locally with the remote supervision of doctors?”

Addo AI is currently working with a government agency from another country to develop a programme that can identify coronavirus risk locations to better divert hospital resources. She says, “My love for technology is deeply rooted in its capacity to empower citizens.”

As for the nomadic Parag, who was born in India and grew up in the United Arab Emirates, US and Germany, he found Singapore to be “by far the best” among a handful of global cities that he wanted to live in as an “urbanist”. A widely cited global intellectual, much of his life work centres around influencing the influential to build a “multipolar equilibrium”.

“I’d like an end to the cycles of superpower competition and their violent rise and decline. Since my first book, I’ve been writing non-stop about how for the first time in history, we live in a global system that is truly multipolar and multi-civilisational at the same time. Governments need to accommodate each other in order to preserve geopolitical equilibrium,” says the founder and managing partner of FutureMap, a data- and scenario-based strategic advisory firm that offers tailored briefings to government leaders and corporate executives on global markets and trends.

[Riaz Haq]

Best of 2019: A woman farmer shows the way |The Third Pole


https://www.thethirdpole.net/2019/12/25/best-of-2019-a-woman-farmer...

https://www2.unwomen.org/-/media/field%20office%20eseasia/docs/publ...

Almas Perween may seem diminutive, but a great deal of responsibility rests on her shoulders. She is a farmer, and a trainer of farmers, a big responsibility for a woman from a village whose name is just a number – Chak #224/EB. Her farm is about 100 kilometres from the historic city of Multan, in the Vehari district of Pakistan’s Punjab province. In many ways Perween epitomises this year’s International Women’s Day’s theme of “Think Equal, Build Smart, Innovate for Change”, putting innovation by women and girls, for women and girls, at the heart of efforts to achieve gender equality.

Challenging gender roles

“Why is cotton-picking always a woman’s job?” was the first thing I heard her say. The question carried within it the challenge to traditional gender roles. While Perween is happy to take on the mantle of what is traditionally seen as men’s work, her question took this further, asking why men cannot do what is traditionally done by women.

It has long been said that the soft, fluffy staple fibre of cotton that grows in a boll can only be picked by women’s dainty hands. Perween refused to accept this, claiming it was “just an excuse not to work”.

“It’s literally back-breaking work and takes a heavy health toll on the women,” she said. Drawing from her experience, she added, “village women work longer hours in a day than men”.

Her experience is borne out by research done elsewhere. A 2018 report on the status of rural women in Pakistan said agricultural work has undergone “feminization” employing nearly 7.2 million rural women, and becoming the largest employer of Pakistani women workers. Yet their multidimensional work with “lines between work for economic gain and work as extension of household chores (livestock management) and on the family farm” are blurred and “does not get captured”.
The report pointed out that for women in the agricultural sector (primarily concentrated in dairy and livestock) the “returns to labour are low: only 40% are in paid employment and 60% work as unpaid workers on family farms and enterprises. Their unpaid work is valued (using comparative median wages) at PKR 683 billion (USD 5.5 billion), is 57% of all work done by women, and is 2.6% of GDP of the country.”

Cotton is one of the many crops grown on Perween’s fields. She manages 23 acres of farmland (of which eight acres belong to her mother). With her brother – three years her senior – the family grows maize, wheat, sugarcane and cotton.

-----------------
Despite the success, it has not always been easy for Perween to take the risks she has. She has been lucky to have the full backing of her family. It is not just her brother’s trust, but also her father’s firm support in the face of criticism from both villagers and the wider family, that has helped her find her own path.

“It has not been easy,” she said, “but it is not impossible either,” Perween says, with a note of triumph in her voice.

[Riaz Haq]

Enabling more Pakistani women to work
UZMA QURESH|MAY 07, 2019

https://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/enabling-more-pak...


There is a broad consensus that no country can progress without the full participation of women in public life .

Most of the positive attributes associated with development – rising productivity, growing personal freedom and mobility, and innovation – require increasing the participation of excluded groups.

Pakistan stands near the bottom of women’s participation in the workforce. This lack of participation is at the root of many of the demographic and economic constraints that Pakistan faces.

It is in that context that the World Bank, in its Pakistan@100 initiative, has identified inclusive growth as one of the key factors to the country’s successful transition to an upper-middle income country by 2047.

Pakistan’s inclusive growth targets require women’s participation in the workforce to rise from a current 26 percent to 45 percent .

Women’s participation rate has almost doubled in 22 years (1992-2014) but the increase isn’t happening fast enough and with much of our population in the youth category, we need to rapidly take measures to address gaps in women’s work status to achieve our goal.

Focus should be on the following priority areas:

Increase access to education, reproductive health services: Half of Pakistani women have not attended school. Presently only 10 percent of women have post-secondary education whereas their chances of working for pay increase three-fold with post-secondary education compared to women with primary education. More educated women are also more likely to get better quality jobs.

Pakistan also couldn’t meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target of reducing maternal mortality ratio to 150. The government must implement anti early age marriage laws and invest in transforming behaviors of parents and society on such practices. This will allow girls to have more years of education and have better reproductive health outcomes. Fertility decline related behavioral change efforts are also critical in addition to improved service delivery to enable women to have healthier lives and find better economic opportunities .

Unpaid Care Work and informal economy: Women are 10 times more involved in household chores, child and elderly care than men in Pakistan. This leads to women being more time poor and having less time to spend in gaining skills and getting jobs.

Social norms also do not support women’s involvement in economic activity outside their homes and this forces them to either fall back in the informal sector (women are heavily concentrated in it) and rely upon unskilled or low skilled jobs (mostly home-based) or to simply not participate in the wider economy. Adoption and effective implementation of home-based and domestic workers laws can address informal economy issues of extremely low wages and lack of access to social security.

The burden of unpaid care work with high fertility rate is in many ways at the root of all of these problems because more children result in more unpaid care work and it also means that women will be in poorer health conditions especially in lower and middle-income levels rendering them unable to acquire the skills needed for gainful employment opportunities.

While recognizing women’s overwhelming engagement in unpaid care work, private and public sector must contribute to reducing the burden by for example investing in daycare centers and adequate maternity and paternity leaves. As part of a wider behavioral transformation process, men in the family need to start sharing unpaid care work with women.


Safer public spaces: Less than half of women surveyed in a 2013 study reported that they feel safe while walking around in their neighborhoods and such women are also more likely to work than women who do not feel safe. Effective implementation of laws on sexual harassment and violence against women will encourage more women to engage in economic activity outside their homes.

[Riaz Haq]

The number of women working outside the home and earning a wage is growing at twice the rate of population growth in Pakistan. That means Pakistani businesses may finally stop ignoring women's basic needs... like comfortable, affordable undergarments.

https://twitter.com/FarooqTirmizi/status/1318051646623109123?s=20

The data on Pakistani women’s rising economic power is staggering. The female labour force participation rate rose from under 16% in 1998 to a peak of 25% in 2015 before declining slightly once again to 22.8% by 2018. That means there are millions of women who are currently working who might not have been, had labour force participation rates for women stayed the same.

https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2020/10/17/so-you-want-to-buy-a...

The total number of women in Pakistan’s labour force – earning a wage outside the home – rose from just 8.2 million women in 1998 to an estimated 23.7 million by 2020, according to Profit’s analysis of data from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. That represents an average increase of 4.9% per year compared to an average of just a 2.4% per year increase in the total population. In short, the growth in the number of women entering the labour force is more than twice as high as the total rate of population increase.

All of those women now in the workforce have more purchasing power than ever before. Women have always had some measure of purchasing discretion for their households. But now, with their own incomes, they have more ability than ever before to make discretionary purchases for themselves, rather than just making decisions for their households. That includes buying more comfortable undergarments.

[Riaz Haq]

Women Left Behind: India’s Falling Female Labor Participation
India’s female labor force participation is the lowest in South Asia.

https://thediplomat.com/2020/07/women-left-behind-indias-falling-fe...

While labor force participation is declining globally on average, women’s participation has increased in high-income countries that have instituted gender-focused policies like parental leave, subsidized childcare, and increased job flexibility. On the Global Gender Gap Index by the World Economic Forum (WEF), India has fallen four places from 2018, now ranking 112 of 153 countries, largely due to its economic gender gap. In less than 15 years, India has fallen 39 places on the WEF’s economic gender gap, from 110th in 2006 to 149th in 2020. Among its South Asian neighbors, India now has the lowest female labor force participation, falling behind Pakistan and Afghanistan, which had half of India’s FLFP in 1990.

[Riaz Haq]

Only 7% of urban #Indian #women have paid jobs.....the share of Indian women who actually find a perch in the workforce is lower than in #SaudiArabia, where 22% do. 53% of #Indonesian women have jobs.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/02/20/only-7-of-urban-indian...


But the dearth of working women in India is not simply a reflection of cultural preferences. Many women on the sidelines of the economy are not there by choice. They say they would like to work if they could. Were they all to get their wish, it would add over 100m women to the workforce, by one calculation. That is more than the total number of workers, male and female, in France, Germany and Italy combined.

Moreover, Indians are not as hostile to women in work as the employment numbers suggest. Their answers to questions like “Should men have more right to a job than women?” are more egalitarian than poll responses in Indonesia, where fully 53% of women pursue work outside the home. Despite that, the share of Indian women who actually find a perch in the workforce is a shade lower than in Saudi Arabia, where 22% do. And in so far as social attitudes do hold women back, they are not immutable. Indeed, employing women is often a catalyst for social enlightenment, rather than a consequence of it.

-----------

India will soon end China’s long run as the world’s most populous country. But by some projections its workforce will not exceed China’s until mid-century, even though Indians are much younger. One reason is that so few women in India are in paid work (see article). The International Labour Organisation says that only a fifth of adult women had a job or sought one in 2019, compared with three-fifths in China. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a local research firm, put the share of urban women in or looking for work at just 7% in November.During the pandemic, women have typically been the first in India to lose their jobs and the last to regain them. School shutdowns have forced some to drop out of the labour force to look after children who would normally be in class. Young women who have been unable to study, train or work during the pandemic are being married off instead. That is a worrying development. Whereas women in other countries often withdraw from the workforce when burdened with a child, women in India drop out when burdened with a husband.Some would say that nothing should, or can, be done about this. If Indian women choose not to work outside the home, the argument runs, that is their business. Dropping out of the labour force is a status symbol for upwardly mobile households, showing they are able to get by on the husband’s earnings alone.

[Riaz Haq]

World Bank: “28 women for every 100 men participate in the labor force in India and Pakistan”. #GenderEquity #SouthAsia #India #Pakistan https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/28


28 women for every 100 men participate in the labor force in India and Pakistan — this compares to 64 women for every 100 men globally, and is the lowest in the world outside the middle east. This dismal statistic highlights a key development challenge: what policies can contribute to achieving gender equity in wages and labor force participation?

-------


The good news is that a recent surge of work in South Asia formally documents the mechanisms underpinning low women’s labor force participation in the region, and proposes policy and interventions that can meaningfully reduce these gaps. There are many excellent reviews of the literature (to cite a few: Fletcher et al. (2017) focus on India, Jayachandran (2019) on social norms and women’s LFP globally, Duflo (2012) on women’s empowerment and economic development more broadly) — this blog simply highlights some of this recent work. The evidence stretches across demand and supply side side explanations, and their interactions in equilibrium.

Mobility constraints A wave of protests in India in 2012, motivated by a brutal sexual assault on a woman commuting to work, highlighted the risks women take when they choose to commute to opportunity. Recent work by Borker (2017) shows that women college students in Delhi are willing to forego admission in higher-ranked schools to as to avoid having to commute along relatively unsafe routes.

Education While interventions to increase safety reduce gender based violence, the potential to correct the attitudes that are the root cause offers enormous hope. Dhar et al (2018) evaluate an intervention at scale targeting attitudes towards restrictive gender norms among lower secondary students. They find large shifts, for both boys and girls, in not only attitudes but also behaviors, suggesting early interventions targeting these attitudes can be effective in shifting norms.


Norms and family While women themselves may want to work, they may face pressures from their family to stay at home. Subramanian (2020) uses a job search platform in urban Pakistan to study how characteristics of jobs affect women’s decisions to apply. She finds that women are much more likely to apply to jobs with female supervisors.

Psychological traps While women are constrained by these norms and attitudes, interventions can effectively support women to overcome these barriers. McKelway (2019) demonstrates that women can find themselves in a “belief trap”: they do not learn they can overcome these barriers because they do not believe that they can.

Husband’s wages and wage gaps Perhaps most surprising about the decrease in women’s labor force participation in India since 1990 is that it occurred during a period of rapid wage growth. Bhargava (2018) shows that married women’s labor supply is more negatively elastic to husbands' wages than it is positively elastic to their own wages

“Gendered” jobs When women’s employment is more accepted in some sectors of the economy, growth in those sectors can generate increases in women’s employment. Heath and Mobarak (2015) study the rapid growth of the garment sector in Bangladesh, which employs 15% of young women nationally.

Role models If social norms shape attitudes, increases in women’s labor force participation or women in positions of authority can shift attitudes, generating positive feedback.