Unpaid labour

LAHORE: Gender bias in employment is a global issue, and more so in Pakistan where social norms force women out of formal work as their labour is needed for household chores that carries no wages.

Within the household, mostly the bread earning male dominates. Engaging prime-age workers in the economy is important for efficiently generating growth by utilising all the labour resources available for producing goods and services in a given country. This includes all genders. Pakistanis must break taboos that prevent women from work.

Working women are more likely to undertake a greater number of hours of unpaid work due to time spent on household chores and care provision. Overall, they are more likely to work longer hours than men when both paid and unpaid work are taken into account. Moreover, when in paid employment, on average, women work fewer hours for pay or profit either because they opt to work part time or because part-time work is the only option available to them.

Decisions women make about their occupation and career do not happen in a vacuum—they are also shaped by society. The long hours required by the highest-paid occupations can make it difficult for women to succeed, since women tend to shoulder the majority of family caretaking duties.

Many professions dominated by women are low paid, and professions that have become female-dominated have become lower paid. Violence against women is a norm in our society too.

The best way to reduce violence against women, is to lift them out of poverty, and empower them to be full and equal members of society. For this, there is a need to break the cycle of early marriage and childbirth.

A comparison of the sectoral distribution of employment by sex reveals strong evidence of gender segregation, with education, health and social work being the sector with the highest relative concentration of women, followed by wholesale and retail trade.

Even when men and women work in the same occupation—whether as hairdressers, cosmetologists, nurses, teachers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, or construction workers—men make more, on average, than women.

The gender pay gap is driven at least in part by the cumulative impact of many instances over the course of women’s lives when they are treated differently than their male peers. Girls can be steered toward gender-normative careers from a very early age.

At a time when parental influence is key, parents are often more likely to expect their sons, rather than their daughters, to work in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics fields, even when their daughters perform at the same level in mathematics.

It is clear that gender equality has a number of important components, but reproduction is a key issue in determining life opportunities. It has been established that investing a dollar in family planning programmes can yield benefits worth $120 – an amazingly high return.

Allowing women to decide if, when, and how often they become pregnant leads to fewer deaths in childbirth and fewer infant deaths. It also gives mothers more time to devote to raising their children and investing in the next generation.

It is not surprising, then, that money spent on family-planning programmes turns out to be such a good investment. Despite progress in many societies, women almost everywhere still suffer from significant levels of discrimination. Even in countries where gender equality has advanced furthest, women are over-represented in lower-paying jobs, under-represented in senior government and business positions, and on the receiving end of most domestic violence.