Double duty for working women

LAHORE: Working women in Pakistan face the dual burden of not only performing their duties satisfactorily at work, but also to excel as housewives doing all the chores of cooking a meal, laundering the clothes, and looking after family.
“There is heavily loaded lip service by the government planners on gender parity,” said social worker Dr Kishwar Dhingra. She said in view of cultural norms, the women are supposed to look after the children and other family members. She said the least the government could do is to establish creditable childcare centres to provide peace of mind to the working women.
She said most of the time women are forced to leave the job till the time their children grow up. Many, she added start a promising career but drop out on the birth of their first child due to social pressures.
She said in developed economies both husband and wife share the burden of household chores. It is considered unmanly in Pakistan for a husband to wash dishes or clean the house.
She said the companies that hire a woman expect her to perform her duty as efficiently as her male counterparts and rightly so.
However, she added the capability of a woman to perform at her best is marred if after duty she has to cook the food for the family, clean the house, wash dishes, and look after children. “By the time she goes to bed, she is completely exhausted,” she said, wondering why well educated liberal looking husbands fail to share the domestic burden to provide some relief to the working women.
Financial analyst Amina Usman said the exclusion of women from economic mainstream is one of the reasons that has kept Pakistan’s growth low. She said Pakistan has the highest level of gender disparity in the region.
Pakistan and Bangladesh are the two countries in the region where social norms are similar. However, she added in just 25 years, Bangladesh has taken a great leap in reducing gender parity. The garment industry is the largest provider of employment in Bangladesh, which dominated by women workers. She said Grameen Bank empowered Bangladeshi women through prudent micro loaning. In Pakistan, majority of the workers in garmenting industry are male, though the largest percentage of women in manufacturing sector is in garment industry.
Amina said at the corporate level, one can count the number of women in high positions in Pakistan. She said women business leaders in Bangladesh are rapidly raising. In India, she added it is compulsory to appoint at least one women director on the board. “Why can’t we do the same?” she asked.
She said gender equality gets a lot of attention these days particularly in developed economies where the population is aging rapidly. These economies cannot survive if all their working age population is not included in economic mainstream. She said in countries like Pakistan, a large number of working age youth are unemployed. Another drawback that Pakistan faces is its low literacy rate. She said is it not criminal to deprive educated girls of employment and instead hire less qualified males due to gender bias. One bias that has some justification is that employers think that a well qualified girl, if given a chance today would probably leave midway through her career after gaining a lot of experience.
Social worker Sofia Asif said that the government should open institutes to impart the right skills to women. The skills chosen should be the ones where less education is needed and the demand is high.
She said government should open as many garment training institutes equipped with best machines for the girls. She gave the example of state of the art institute opened by TEVTA in Gajumata Lahore which imparts three month training to 100 women. The training is conducted on machines used by the best companies in Pakistan. She said all the 100 women get employment in the factory of their choice after receiving a certificate from the institute.