n June this year, the World Economic Forum released the 19th edition of its Global Gender Gap Report, ranking Pakistan at the bottom (148th). The report measures countries’ progress towards gender parity on four key dimensions: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political empowerment. As highlighted in the report, Pakistan ranks 147th in “economic participation and opportunity.”It has consistently ranked among the four lowest countries on the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report since its inception in 2006.

Pakistan’s gender gap in labour force participation rates (LFPR) is one of the world’s highest. There is a 56-point gap when we compare LFPR for women (25 percent) and men (81 percent). For the last 15 years, the female LFPR has hovered around 23 percent. This piece focuses on labour force participation and recommends certain reforms to improve women’s workforce engagement.

Women constitute 49 percent of Pakistan’s 241 million population and 23 percent of the labour force. An estimated 47 million women are out of the labour force. Even when women want to participate in the labour force, they are unable to find employment. There is a noticeable gender gap in unemployment. It is 5.5 percent for male workers and 9.2 percent for female workers. In the urban areas, the female unemployment rate rises to 16.4 percent compared to male rate of 6 percent.

Women’s share in overall wage employment is less than 20 percent as they are engaged primarily as contributing family workers (56 percent), eventually working without pay. Of all the working women in Pakistan, 75 percent are in vulnerable employment, a combination of self-employed work and contributing (unpaid) family work, which makes them both invisible and vulnerable to economic shocks.

When women work, they are primarily engaged in agriculture (68 percent) as contributing family workers, followed by community/ social and personal services (15.8 percent) and manufacturing (14.2 percent). More than 40 percent of the employed women work part-time (less than 35 hours per week) as compared to 7 percent of men. Data shows that Pakistan has a youth population (aged 15-24 years) of 50 million, of which 18 million are neither in education, training, nor in any employment (NEET). This translates into a NEET rate of 36 percent. The NEET rate for female youth is 56 percent.

The gender wage gap for mean monthly income is 19 percent, meaning a female worker earns 81 rupees for every 100 rupees earned by a male worker. The median gender wage gap (showing the experience of a typical worker) is nearly double the mean wage gap, i.e., 37.5 percent. The factor-weighted gender wage gap, an adjusted measure of wage inequality that controls for key characteristics of male and female workers — such as age, education, occupation, sector (public/private) and working time........

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