FOR a quarter of a century, nearly everything that is supposed to bring women into the workforce has been moving in the right direction in Pakistan. Female university enrolment has grown roughly six-fold since 2000. Fertility has fallen, and families continue to move from villages to cities, where jobs are closer and more varied. In the standard economic playbook, these are the three important engines of women’s employment: education raises the wages a woman can earn, fewer children free her time, and urban labour markets put work within reach. And yet female labour force participation has barely moved. It has sat in the 22-25 per cent range for years, among the lowest in the world, while roughly four out of five working-age men are in the labour force. The engines are running but the vehicle is stationary.

This is what makes Pakistan an exception, and a puzzle. In most countries that experienced comparable gains in women’s education and comparable declines in fertility, women’s employment rose. Bangladesh’s garment boom transformed the lives of millions of women whose profiles were not so different from those of women in Pakistan. Pakistan has similar garment factories, often recruiting from the same kind of neighbourhoods, and the surge never came. Models based on preferences and material constraints would predict higher participation than we observe, which means something else is holding the equilibrium in place.

The usual suspects are real enough: unsafe transport, poor working conditions, informality,........

© Dawn