Working Women Seeding a Silent Social Revolution in Pakistan

While Fareed Zakaria, Nick Kristoff and other talking heads are still stuck on the old stereotypes of Muslim women, the status of women in Muslim societies is rapidly changing, and there is a silent social revolution taking place with rising number of women joining the workforce and moving up the corporate ladder in Pakistan.



"More of them(women) than ever are finding employment, doing everything from pumping gasoline and serving burgers at McDonald’s to running major corporations", says a report in the latest edition of Businessweek magazine.



Beyond company or government employment, there are a number of NGOs focused on encouraging self-employment and entrepreneurship among Pakistani women by offering skills training and microfinancing. Kashf Foundation led by a woman CEO and BRAC are among such NGOs. They all report that the success and repayment rate among female borrowers is significantly higher than among male borrowers.



In rural Sindh, the PPP-led government is empowering women by granting over 212,864 acres of government-owned agriculture land to landless peasants in the province. Over half of the farm land being given is prime nehri (land irrigated by canals) farm land, and the rest being barani or rain-dependent. About 70 percent of the 5,800 beneficiaries of this gift are women. Other provincial governments, especially the Punjab government have also announced land allotment for women, for which initial surveys are underway, according to ActionAid Pakistan.



Both the public and private sectors are recruiting women in Pakistan's workplaces ranging from Pakistani military, civil service, schools, hospitals, media, advertising, retail, fashion industry, publicly traded companies, banks, technology companies, multinational corporations and NGOs, etc.



Here are some statistics and data that confirm the growth and promotion of women in Pakistan's labor pool:

1. A number of women have moved up into the executive positions, among them Unilever Foods CEO Fariyha Subhani, Engro Fertilizer CFO Naz Khan, Maheen Rahman CEO of IGI Funds and Roshaneh Zafar Founder and CEO of Kashf Foundation.

2. Women now make up 4.6% of board members of Pakistani companies, a tad lower than the 4.7% average in emerging Asia, but higher than 1% in South Korea, 4.1% in India and Indonesia, and 4.2% in Malaysia, according to a February 2011 report on women in the boardrooms.

3. Female employment at KFC in Pakistan has risen 125 percent in the past five years, according to a report in the NY Times.

4. The number of women working at McDonald’s restaurants and the supermarket behemoth Makro has quadrupled since 2006.



5. There are now women taxi drivers in Pakistan. Best known among them is Zahida Kazmi described by the BBC as "clearly a respected presence on the streets of Islamabad".



6. Several women fly helicopters and fighter jets in the military and commercial airliners in the state-owned and private airlines in Pakistan.

Here are a few excerpts from the recent Businessweek story written by Naween Mangi:

About 22 percent of Pakistani females over the age of 10 now work, up from 14 percent a decade ago, government statistics show. Women now hold 78 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly, and in July, Hina Rabbani Khar, 34, became Pakistan’s first female Foreign Minister. “The cultural norms regarding women in the workplace have changed,” says Maheen Rahman, 34, chief executive officer at IGI Funds, which manages some $400 million in assets. Rahman says she plans to keep recruiting more women for her company.

Much of the progress has come because women stay in school longer. More than 42 percent of Pakistan’s 2.6 million high school students last year were girls, up from 30 percent 18 years ago. Women made up about 22 percent of the 68,000 students in Pakistani universities in 1993; today, 47 percent of Pakistan’s 1.1 million university students are women, according to the Higher Education Commission. Half of all MBA graduates hired by Habib Bank, Pakistan’s largest lender, are now women. “Parents are realizing how much better a lifestyle a family can have if girls work,” says Sima Kamil, 54, who oversees 1,400 branches as head of retail banking at Habib. “Every branch I visit has one or two girls from conservative backgrounds,” she says.

Some companies believe hiring women gives them a competitive advantage. Habib Bank says adding female tellers has helped improve customer service at the formerly state-owned lender because the men on staff don’t want to appear rude in front of women. And makers of household products say female staffers help them better understand the needs of their customers. “The buyers for almost all our product ranges are women,” says Fariyha Subhani, 46, CEO of Unilever Pakistan Foods, where 106 of the 872 employees are women. “Having women selling those products makes sense because they themselves are the consumers,” she says.

To attract more women, Unilever last year offered some employees the option to work from home, and the company has run an on-site day-care center since 2003. Engro, which has 100 women in management positions, last year introduced flexible working hours, a day-care center, and a support group where female employees can discuss challenges they encounter. “Today there is more of a focus at companies on diversity,” says Engro Fertilizer CFO Khan, 42. The next step, she says, is ensuring that “more women can reach senior management levels.”

The gender gap in South Asia remains wide, and women in Pakistan still face significant obstacles. But there is now a critical mass of working women at all levels showing the way to other Pakistani women.

I strongly believe that working women have a very positive and transformational impact on society by having fewer children, and by investing more time, money and energies for better nutrition, education and health care of their children. They spend 97 percent of their income and savings on their families, more than twice as much as men who spend only 40 percent on their families, according to Zainab Salbi, Founder, Women for Women International, who recently appeared on CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria.

Here's an interesting video titled "Redefining Identity" about Pakistan's young technologists, including women, posted by Lahore-based 5 Rivers Technologies:



Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Status of Women in Pakistan

Microfinancing in Pakistan

Gender Gap Worst in South Asia

Status of Women in India

Female Literacy Lags in South Asia

Land For Landless Women

Are Women Better Off in Pakistan Today?

Growing Insurgency in Swat

Religious Leaders Respond to Domestic Violence

Fighting Agents of Intolerance

A Woman Speaker: Another Token or Real Change

A Tale of Tribal Terror

Mukhtaran Mai-The Movie

World Economic Forum Survey of Gender Gap

Pakistan's Economic Slump Hurts Workers

Pakistan has a diverse economy that includes textiles, chemicals, leather products, food processing, financial services, telecommunications, retail, automobile manufacturing, light and heavy armaments, agriculture and other industries. It is the 45th largest economy in the world in terms of official exchange rates ($144b) and 25th largest based on purchasing power parity ($410b PPP). Its service sector accounts for more than half of its GDP.

As the economies in the US and Europe slow down, Pakistan's key exports of textiles and leather products are experiencing a slowdown in growth as well. This is particularly painful at a time when the country's import bill has skyrocketed due to rising oil and food prices. Textile exports in Pakistan grew from 8.92 billion USD in 2004-05 to 10.11 billion USD in 2005-06, reflecting a growth rate of 18%. As against this, in the current year, export growth has been only 5%. For all leather goods excluding footwear growth was 24.05%. Of the total leather sector export target of $1.135 billion, the tanned leather, in particular, achieved excess export by $38 million till April 2008. However, the new target of $1.5b by 2010 is proving to be difficult to achieve. Reliable figures are hard to find but the closure of a large number of textile units due to power cuts during the last three months has led to job losses for more than 15 percent of the textile workforce, according to Karachi's Business Recorder newspaper.

Textile industry represents the biggest exporter and the largest industrial employer in Pakistan. According to most recent figures, textile exports fetched $7.805 billion of total export of $13.476 billion during the first nine-month. The sector lost considerable share in overall export of the country as it dropped to below 58 percent in July-March of current fiscal year, which used to be around 65 percent in the past. The textile exports declined by three percent from the export figures of the corresponding period last year and they missed the target for this period with a huge margin of $979 million or 11 percent.

Leather industry is the second largest exporter. The industry employs about 200,000 people directly, producing fine quality finished leather for export as well as for home consumption, according to Pakistan Tanners Association.

In Asia, Pakistan is the 8th largest exporter of textile products. The contribution of this industry to the total GDP is 8.5%. It provides employment to about 15 million people, 30% of the country work force of about 49 million. However, the proportion of skilled labor involved in textiles is relatively small as compared to that of unskilled labor. Agriculture still the largest single employer with 44% of the country's work force but it only contributes 21% of the GDP.

In addition to continuing political instability and power cuts in Pakistan, the worldwide economic slowdown is causing concerns and hurting the textile and leather industries and employees. According to a report by Gregory Warner for American Public Radio's Marketplace program, the leather industry is not growing like it used to and unemployment and crimes are on the rise.

The Marketplace report talks about the young, mostly Pashtun workers, who come from their villages to seek unskilled, low wage jobs in Karachi and other urban centers in Pakistan. It singles out one young worker, 17-year old Momin from Pakistan's north-west frontier province (NWFP), who makes $68-$88 a month transferring skins from a cart to a conveyor belt in a Korangi tannery in Karachi. When asked if he ever visits his village to see his parents, Momin tells the reporter, "How can I go home? If I have to keep paying somebody? I keep paying what my family owes." On top of that, his father wants him to pay for his Hajj, a journey to Mecca that costs at least $3000.00.

A recent BBC report talked about an unemployed textile worker, Gul Rehan, also from an NWFP village, who says he has never depended on charity to cope with hunger and poverty before. But now he sits in a line outside a restaurant in Karachi, waiting for free food. First, his crop on a little piece of land in NWFP failed, and then the towel factory where he took a job, like most knitwear industries, closed down last year.

According to the BBC report, three times a day, hundreds of men, women and children queue up outside dozens of Karachi hotels for meals which are paid for by philanthropists and charity donors.


The rapidly rising unemployment and skyrocketing inflation together have dramatically increased hunger and poverty among the most vulnerable in Pakistan. At 33%, the sum of unemployment rate and inflation, known as the misery index, stands at its highest level in Pakistan's history, and it is likely to increase social strife and hurt the chances of recovery.

These reports highlight the deteriorating economy in Pakistan and its disproportionate impact on the poor migrant workers. Unless the current leadership finds a way to stabilize the economy, the workers suffering is likely to add to greater political instability in Pakistan.

There are many Pakistanis who argue that we must give democracy half a chance to cope with the challenges even if it means going through a slump in exchange for sustainable power of the people to govern themselves. Unfortunately, people like Gul Rehan and Momin, who can least afford it, end up bearing the brunt of such sacrifices. The "civil society" and the "fearless pro-democracy leaders" usually do not forgo their meals to achieve democracy.

I am all for sacrifice, I just wish that the sacrifice be shared more equitably by all of the people. We should all help however we can through various charitable institutions. But I think the "pro-democracy leaders" such as Aitazaz Ahsan, Nawaz Sharif, Asma Jahangir and others who have contributed to the current economic decline have a special responsibility. They can and should use their celebrity status to raise awareness of the issues of poverty and joblessness. They should help organize efforts to build a safety net for the most vulnerable. This would demonstrate their sincerity of concern for the poor and the disenfranchised.

Here's a video clip about skyrocketing inflation in Pakistan and its impact on the poor: