Women’s labour

A RECENT report by the IMF includes a calculation which suggests that Pakistan’s GDP could be increased by up to 30pc with more empowerment of women in the labour force. The number itself can be debated; it was originally computed in a paper published in 2016 in the Journal of Human Capital. What is beyond doubt, however, is the fact that increasing women’s empowerment in the labour force carries tangible benefits for the economy, ultimately measured in rising GDP. From a practical perspective alone, this is a powerful reason to make economic policy more sensitive to gender issues. Female participation in the labour force in Pakistan is abysmally low. The percentage in the age group above 20 years does not go beyond 30pc. Most of the women are located in the rural areas. For urban areas, the participation rates are even more dismal. For all age groups, the female participation rate in the labour force is 7.7pc in urban Pakistan, one of the lowest in the world. If GDP growth can be boosted by low cost and highly targeted interventions that help empower women, then economic policy should take such interventions as a serious area of focus.

Towards this end, the report does present some suggestions. Pakistan has made some headway by linking conditional cash transfers to female school enrolment through the Benazir Income Support Programme, the authors of the report note. But much headway can be made by increasing financial inclusion, not necessarily by tying it to women’s work, because exclusion from formal finance is particularly acute for women. Increasing the pathways from which this access can be enhanced will have automatic knock-on effects for women’s empowerment, they argue. The idea is not to pursue sheer quantum increases in the participation ratios, because that can be achieved through child labour as well. The idea is to increase high quality participation ratio for age brackets above 20 years, through superior access to education, financial services, as well as health facilities and polices designed to proactively accommodate women in the workforce. A simple walk around any Pakistani city clearly shows the sheer gender disparity, with men predominantly visible on the streets and offices. This needs to change, not only for the benefit of women, but also for that of the country’s economy as whole.