Gender at Work in Pakistan

This book analyses the structuring role that gender plays for accessing work, experiencing work, and working conditions in Pakistan.

Considering how these structures have been challenged and changed, the collection provides a fine-grained engagement with the role of gender at work in Pakistan against the backdrop of policy and academic discourses that often invisibilise the work and employment of women and transgender persons while normalising a male breadwinner model and masculine norms in and beyond the workplace. The book engages explicitly with feminist thought from South Asia and informs wider feminist discourses with fresh perspectives from Pakistani thinkers. Chapters straddle the analysis of occupations as diverse as agricultural labour, home-based industrial outwork, and domestic and unpaid care work. In line with transnational feminist thought, this book contextualises gendered labouring practices whilst paying attention to how gendered relations at work are embedded within cross-border dynamics, colonial histories and the global political economy. This wide perspective includes a critical engagement with neoliberal discourses around women’s paid employment as empowerment and the celebration of women’s entrepreneurship. Taking on board how gender can become a resource for resistance, this book counters and complicates the trope of ‘victimised’ Southern or Muslim women.

Informed by disciplines including organisation theory, sociology, economics and social psychology, and including contributions from practitioners, government and NGO workers and academics, this book will be of interest to scholars and professionals concerned with challenging binary notions of gender in the workplace, and how this is complicated through the intersections of gender with ethnic, class, caste, religious, generational and other social divisions and hierarchies in the global South.

Hadia Majid is Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS. Her research examines gender, labor markets, digital inclusion, and development in the Global South, with a particular focus on women’s work and economic opportunity in Pakistan. She works closely with policymakers and international organizations to translate research into evidence-based policy.

Kaveri Qureshi is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science, and a Co-Director of GENDER.ED, Edinburgh University’s hub for gender and sexualities. She researches intersectional inequalities in health, work and family life, mainly in the UK and South Asia.

Karin Astrid Siegmann works as an Associate Professor in Labor and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS). She holds more than 25 years of experience in the interdisciplinary field of Development Studies, including extensive expertise on and collaboration with partners in Pakistan.