Background

Women in Pakistan primarily work in the home or in the agriculture sector. Additionally, a large majority of Pakistani women work in the informal sector as well - as domestic workers, and unpaid employees at small family businesses. Labor force participation of the Pakistani woman is far below that of other South Asian countries with similar income levels. Government efforts to bridge the gender wage gap and create safer work environments do not seem to have succeeded with percent participation in labor-force remaining low despite a wage increase of over 100% in the past twenty years. Some may argue that this is due to a lack of opportunity for social mobility for the average Pakistani woman due to a lack of access to education. Women may not feel comfortable working outside the home/family businesses because of a lack of exposure to independence which would come from going to school as a girl. Societal pressures and a cycle of low literacy may push the education of women down the priority list. Additionally, women may be living in areas where there are little to no education institutions. Making their way to school may be a safety concern. and This may be true and, this is an issue of social welfare that must be addressed. However, this project will examine the low labor force participation of women who have had access to education. This is because the similarity of circumstances and small number of this group of women in Pakistan may, possibly, make it so a single intervention may have a significant impact.

In 2019, 28% of women with advanced education were unemployed - nearly a third. In 2015 this number peaked, at 40%.1 However, excluding the peak of 2015, the number has stayed close to 20% between the years 2013-2019. However this value is only reflective of those that are still a part of the labor force, or actively seeking employment. As of September 2021, 40% of highly educated women were jobless.2 When comparing this 40% to the figure of 20% unemployment rate of highly educated women, it may be concluded that there is a significant number of women who are highly educated who are not interested in working.

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Causal Factors

Demanding Home Life

The problem of maintaining a work-life balance is not unique to Pakistan, or women. However, the societal expectations on women to maintain the home are not similar to the expectations on men. In countries like Pakistan, a great deal of focus is put on the extended family and maintaining those family ties. In the Asian culture, a general practice is to never ‘break off’ from ones parents, as it is a custom to do at the age of 18 in many western nations. Parents continue to live with their many children, and the families of those children, for the majority of their lives. Households oftrmen consist of over 10 people: grand parents, children, and families of the children. There is a gentle and eventual hand off of financial responsibility from parents to the child when the child becomes financially stable.

Though there are many benefits of a lifestyle like this a downfall is the additional pressure on the members of the family who are responsible and physically fit enough to take on care taking responsibilities. Unfortunately, the time at which one comes to meet these requirements often coincides with peak career building years. Typically, because of a woman’s biological ability to carry and feed a child, they often become the family care takers because they are caring for their children anyway. As a result, men take on financial responsibility. Furthermore, certain households maybe less open-minded and force adoption of typical gender roles. Often, in the west, being the care-taker is not difficult a task because only the nuclear family is involved. Women are able to return to work after taking a certain amount of time off after the birth of a child, and manage both career and family then on wards. Unfortunately, the life of Pakistani woman is very different and demanding.

Statistics echo this conjecture as well, the probability of work participation rises by 5.6 percentage points as one unit is added to the household size. Though, intuitively, one may think this has the opposite effect due to another person needing care entering the home, it is more likely that the other person joining the family may be someone who may share in the role of ‘home maker.’ This is often in the shape of one of the men in the home getting married. The support felt by women from women stretches out of the home and to the neighborhood as well: females are 15% more likely to join the labor force with the addition of one female in urban neighborhoods.3 There are on average 286.5 people per sq km in Pakistan, compared to 36.02 in the US.4 As a result, it is a very real possibility that your neighbors are someone you interact with enough to befriend quickly and depend on for certain house hold responsibilities (like child care, for example).

The graph below, extracted from a policy brief by ADB, depicts the perception of the load of responsibilities for Pakistanis. This policy brief does a great job at visualizing data relating to education of women in Pakistan. Three graphs from this brief are included in this project; they are to follow. This graph reveals that employees, women and men, are by far the most overwhelmed with ‘too much to do’ at nearly 30%. Employed males do, on average, believe to have more free time, with nearly 25% answering ‘too little to do.’ Furthermore, nearly 20% of unemployed females feel they have too much to do as well.5

Lack of Autonomy

It is true that women in Pakistan lack autonomy. Autonomy is the ability to have control over one’s own life. The Pakistani women does lack autonomy, impacting their access to career opportunities. A form of autonomy is freedom of movement. A 2006 study found that over two-thirds of women take someone’s permission to leave the home. 90% of women require someone’s permission to leave town. Additionally, the study found that less than 15% of women travel to a different village unaccompanied. However, when the relationship between autonomy in movement and happiness of Pakistani women was studied, an insignificant result was discovered, indicating that there is no association between the happiness of a woman and autonomy of movement6. This points to the fact that, not only are women not the deciders of whether should be able to leave the home or not, they also are not motivated to fight for that right. This may be because the society, especially rural areas, does not feel safe for women. They may find comfort in the protecting shadow of family’s wisdom/physical presence in the form of accompaniment. Autonomy in movement is a great contributing factor to a women working because, traditionally, they must be able to step in and out of the house to go to work. Now, one may think that a household that holds a well educated woman would be a household that has no qualms about her working. However, there are many contributing factors to why university and colleges are considered safe and working environments are not. For example, Pakistani colleges and universities often have school bus systems, a women must arrange her own commute to work; work place harassment is rampant and consequence are rare; and often work hours in Pakistan are much later than the US (11am-9pm).

Beyond the freedom of movement, the over arching idea of working at all and the decision-making aspect of choosing to work is also something Pakistani women do not have much control over. A woman who is passionate enough about education to surpass the norm level of education, is often a women who is also motivated to further succeed by entering the labor force. However, they may not always be the one’s making that decision. It is untrue that women have no decision-making authority in Pakistan. For example, when a child is sick, the majority of decision-making power is with the woman. Contrary to popular belief about women in Muslim countries, the majority of women also said that they have the power to decide what to wear. However, because of the joint family system, many of the ‘vital’ decisions in the home are taken by elders or male members. The association between autonomy of decision making and happiness is significant6. The graph below, from the ABD policy brief, reflects the finding that less than 25% of women have any say in their life decisions, approximately less than 20% have the independent freedom to decide.

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PROPOSED SOLUTION: ‘WorkingWoman’ Website

Introduction

2018 World Bank education indicators suggest, out of the entire primary literate population of Pakistan only 28% are girls. The pool of educated students pursuing education at the post-secondary level is dramatically decreased, with only approximately 15% of all students pursuing tertiary education. 44% of this 15% are women who have broken the glass ceiling and are working to obtaining a graduate or undergraduate degree7. After graduation, this extremely group of women divides into three groups: those who enter the job market, those who want to but are facing hurdles, those who saw their degree as the end goal and do not wish to pursue a career3. The graph below, from the ADB Policy Brief, visualizes this group of three, with 50% of working, approximately 27% wanting to work, and approximately 23% not wanting to work. The goal of this project is to target the 27% desiring work. These are the woman who are ‘sitting on the fence’ so goal is to not only employee these women but to empower them with resources to learn more about the professional world and receive guidance. This group of women is 27% of 44% of 15% of 28% of the Pakistani population. As a result of the small size, it is possible that a single intervention in the shape of a civic tech innovation, may make a significant difference. The WorkingWoman website is the combination of a job-search website, talent management, networking, and educational website. The website is an innovative way for flexible and ‘suitable’ opportunities to reach women, keeping in mind the unique restrains on them. Though, in an ideal world, women would be free from these restrictions, the goal for this website would be to allow them some independence in their present-day circumstances.

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The WorkingWoman website would be a government platform. The website is an opportunity for public-private partnership for a philanthropic cause. The website would differ from websites like Indeed or Google Careers in that is not simply a website that searches for all requisitions across other platforms and centralizes them in one place for job searching. Rather, the WorkingWoman job-search website would be a place for government agencies/companies/institutions to post requisitions that are meant only to reach this particular group of potential employees, highly educated women who desire different job structures than the typical office job. In Pakistan’s 2025 Vision Summary, women empowerment is at the forefront with five goals relating to women empowerment and freedom. This is website can be part of this initiative8. Why would firms be interested in this? Firms may be interested in taking this up as a way to add to their ‘giving-back’ and philanthropic efforts. Certain firms also maintain a diversity and equality quota. Therefore, if there is need to search for only female employees - this website would be able to fulfill it. Additionally, firms may be struggling to find those willing to work atypical jobs. In this sense, it would be a win-win situation for both parties.

Jobs may be be part-time, remote, project-based, and resource-pool jobs. Additionally, jobs may be full-time but only on-location for certain events, or have a benefit plans that includes child-care, for example. There is no condition on what job can be posted. There would be a review of each requisition before it is posted, but the conditions of review would only be relating to if the job is in fact different from a ‘typical’ job. The website would also include information and advice specifically catered to this set of women(how to prioritize work as a part time employee, how to reenter the job market, how to enhance your resume through personal at-home projects, etc.). The website would also host virtual job fairs by various government agencies/firms, and post by project hire opportunities by individuals/companies. Moving on from the employment goal to the empowerment goal- the website will also hold a space for career coaching, gaining confidence and comfort through networking.

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Website Layout

In this section, I will pull from various popular job searching sites. I will be sharing screen prints of elements from each that I would want to incorporate in the WorkingWoman website. I will also be describing unique elements that would be a part of the WorkingWoman website, that I have not seen elsewhere.

Project-Based Employment Requisitions

Another element I would like to include in WorkingWoman is project based employment. This is a type of employment that I feel would really appeal to many of these women as it provides an opportunity to ‘test the waters’ of the proffesional world before jumping in. Additionally, these jobs provide a heightened amount of flexibility as they are often very short-term and without strict hours. Women who have limited ability not by day, but by time of year, for example, may benefit from this. We can use summer break for children as an example, it is possible that women have less time during the months of summer break when children are at home. As a result, they may chose to take a 6 month project from August on-wards.

The job posting ability for projects would also expand from businesses/agencies to individuals. This would be an opportunity for individuals in Pakistan to also fulfill their internal philanthropic responsibilities and, is a great resume building opportunity for those women who have been out of the labor force for some time. Below is an example of a project-based job post from the website Guru.com. This is an ideal example of what a project-based job post would be on WorkingWoman.com: description of hours-per-week job requirement, description of months-per-year requirement, description of pay. WorkingWoman would be a public platform, to ensure the credibility of out platform and saftety of our users, we would go a step further and, vet the posts by individuals to ensure they are legitimate. https://www.guru.com/

Career Coaching

Career coaching is another feature that would be included in the WorkingWomen website. This is a feature that would aid with both employment and empowerment as career coaches would not only work to guide users on what direction to move in with their careers but also on rights in the professional world. The job coaching element would add a personal touch to the process which would aid in user experience. Additionally, job coaches would have the ability to hear out individual circumstances of users and, as a result, advice them to move in directions where they have better chances of placement. Being able to interact with an individual may make the job search less daunting for someone who is new to the job market.

The website muse.com is a career coaching website off which WorkingWoman would take inspiration. The landing page of the website includes a 60 second tutorial. This would be an excellent element to include in the website as it would tell users how and what they can expect from a coaching section. This opens up the possibility that someone just browsing the website may watch the video and be enticed to move forward. The “How can a Career Coach Partner With you?” piece is what drew me to this website. When selecting a job coach, you often make a choice based of individual credentials, like years of experience, for example. However, the approach of selecting based off problem at hand will not only give career coaches insight into what to expect but, also a higher chance of a best matched career coach for the user. This approach is also more ‘welcoming’ to the user as it feels catered to them. The job coaching would be via scheduled appointments and, a live chat feature would be available for more basic questions that may be answered by trained customer support staff. This will likely be in partnership with an outside job-coaching firm. https://www.themuse.com/coaching

MyKnowledge Platform

The MyKnowledge platform will be a separate module within the WorkingWoman page that will be geared towards learning and knowledge. Since our target audience is women who are highly educated, the content of this learning system will not be geared towards technical skills. Rather, this problem will be geared towards life skills in the professional context and, building a career. This module will be a place where virtual events/workshops are held and, preprepared classes can be found. Some example workshops may be: “Dealing with Difficult Personalities During the Recruitment Process,” “How to Approach Reentering the Workforce,” and “Moms, How to Begin Building a Career.” Courses may include, “Professional Communication,” and “Basics of Working Remote.”

To run this platform, there will be a team of internal employees who specialize in gender, operations, and recruitment. The team will reach out to Non-profit organization, government agencies, motivational speaker, and others to host events. The team will also host regular in-house events. The team will also create courses for the learning management system, based off feedback from users and data on the needs of women in the workplace. Below are some examples of webpages that the WorkingWomen MyKnowledge module would resemble. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/

https://uic.joinhandshake.com/stu/events

Data Usage

Data will be a key element in the success of the Working Woman Platform. Below is a table which details the data flow for various types of data that would be gathered and used.

Resources Needed

This is a project that will stretch across many industries: there is a software development aspect, a philanthropic aspect, and a research aspect - to name a few. As a result, the long-term success of this project would be based on the synchronicity of the various moving parts. In order to ensure this, there must be good quality technology at the foundation and a solid team of employees who can act as the conjoining force between the many moving parts. The key resource is this team which will pull together other resources and identify need of other resources. The team would serve as the decision-makers and operations managers of the project. This step in the process is associated with the influx of two resources: funds to pay the expert team’s salaries and, the human-capital of the team.

At the next stage is to develop the website, which would be done in partnernship with the nonprofit ‘Code for Pakistan’ as they are working on many other civic technology projects with the federal government. Partnership is another core element in the success of WorkingWoman. The WorkingWoman team would consistently need to build and maintain partnerships with job-posting entities, knowledge imparting research institutions, nonprofits for live sessions, and whomever they chose to partner with for the job coaching element. These partnership efforts would likely require a separate set of employees to maintain. WorkingWoman would also need to employee customer service representatives for the live chat feature. To summarize, the key inputs for the long-term success and development of WorkingWoman are: executive level employees to make key decisions, software and gender experts (specifically women’s tertiary education) to maintain the systems and content relevance side, operations and outreach managers, and customer service staff, and cooperation from outside organizations. Excluding cooperation from outside organizations, all of these inputs would require use of funds. Additionally, at the point of launching, there may be some marketing costs for ads and hiring someone to create marketing materials. However, since this is a philanthropic initiative, it is possible that we may be able to negotiate less than market pricing or other agreements which would decrease our overall costs.

Implementation

As a public project, this would likely be something taken on by the Pakistan National Committee on the Status of Women. The committee would likely create the core team mentioned above and, oversee the project from a distance. Team executives would likely be the decision-makers for the most part - occasionally giving presentations and getting approval from the National Committee on most important decisions. As previously mentioned, ‘Code for Pakistan’ would be an essential part of the WorkingWoman project as they would likely create the website. The implementation process will begin once the project has a ‘home’ in a website which takes the idea from concept to reality, and a team of executives and experts to manage said website.

After the development stage begins the implementation stage. The flowchart below summarizes the implementation process of the WorkingWoman website. This flowchart begins after the point of full staff senior staff appointment and completed design. At this stage the back-end process would be complete and all that would remain is the roll-out, and employment of support staff (customer service, outreach). It is important to note that though the process below will carry out for the first time at in a time-period immediately after roll-out (maybe in the first year), it will repeat regularly in the long-run to keep the website up, useful, and constantly improving.

Limitations

The following are some limitations of this project that must be considered. Below the limitations are proposed solutions that may help tackle the challenge described.

  • Women may not have access to a laptop or computer device.

Solution: The ratio of phone numbers to population is 87.5/10010. We can work on developing an app or create a hotline off which at least the job coaching feature can be reached.

  • Though English is the official language of Pakistan and of higher education institutions, some women may not be most comfortable with the use of English for the webpage.

Solution: Translate website and create an easy to see button which switches between languages.

  • Women may not have independent bank accounts in which to get paid for remote jobs.

Solution: Pakistan has many ‘Venmo’ and ‘Western Union’ type platforms off which women can collect cash payments from their local general store by verifying their ID. We would discuss with out partners to make this a possible payment method.

  • We may have periods of low private partnerships

Since this is a public project, we can work with other government agencies and have conversations at the governmental level to ensure there is a consistent inflow of public jobs.

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Conclusion and Expected Outcome

The hope for this project is that it will give the unemployed 27% of highly-educated women in Pakistan a shot at achieving their potential. As was described in the ‘Causal Factors’ section, women in Pakistan face many restrictions. Gaining an education and starting a career are not always viewed as two steps in the same journey: some may thing school and universities are a safe place whereas the work place is dangerous and unsupervised. Further, entering the work force simply may not be feasible for women with the demanding home life they have, due to the joing family structure in Pakistan. Either way, this is a group of women that are bright and passionate enough to pursue tertiary education - the top tier of education. This is a solution that will provide them some relief in the now. In the long-run, hope is that women in Pakistan will have more relief from these problems and some great work is being done by our national committees and nonprofits. However, the WorkingWoman platform will not focus on the overarching issues, the aim is simply to get our woman a solution to their problems by bringing them the opportunities they deserve and that are easy for them to pursue. The use of technology and the internet makes it so women can reach out rich resources at home, without facing the issue of their lack of autonomy in mobility. The hope is the atypical and less demanding jobs on this platform will be something women and their family members can more easily accept. The back-end focus on partnerships is so that firms/agencies/individuals are encouraged to post and create more atypical jobs for this group of women. The hope is to meet the want of these women for ‘suitable’ jobs and, on the national level, see an increase in employed educated women.

Lessons Learned

This project is the first project I have done that was so creative and innovative. The majority of my projects so far for other classes were relating to analysis of an existing problem. However, this project was the first time I had to come up with a solution and that too in the form of an innovation of my own. There are quite a few lessons I learned in this process that was very new for me.

Creative projects can get ‘messy’

Since you are the owner of this idea and, you have the power to add as many elements as you chose - it is possible for your project to get out of hand. When brainstorming for this project, there were other features that I originally wanted to include. One example is of my want to include a support aspect - hiring psychologists to provide psychological support to these women as many feel very oppressed by their circumstances. I would have included something like a Betterhelp.com webpage. However, when moving forward with the project I was losing track of all the elements I was included and, I was having problems coming up with how to connect it all. With so many moving parts there is also an increased possibility in gaps in your concept design. For example, with this therapist angle, I forgot how we were going to gain access to these therapists - is it going to be that licensed individuals can sign up? Do we reach out to a firm? How do we vet these people? At the end, I decided to narrow down and stick to features that were essential to my core goals of employment and empowerment. This has definitely taught me that is essential to decide on what you want to include early on and select the best few of your ideas when working on a creative project.

Data is not as easy to access everywhere as it is in the US

I really struggled to find much information on the group of women I focused on. Other than the ADB policy brief, there was really no thorough open research in this space. I will ensure to check beforehand if data is available before narrowing down on a project. Furthermore, for a lot of Pakistani data sources, there is a pay wall. To reach this data without paying, I would have to reach out to the original source. I would give myself more time to do that next time.

Civic technology developed in the public sector is very different!

Something that I reflected on while doing this project is how unique civic technology is. When deciding upon each creative factor and, when thinking over the implementation phase, I identified many truths about civic technology that set it apart from technology development in the private sector. Civic technology development is often done through public sector initiatives which already have a host of resources at easy access, including funding, advertising, and experts. The struggle phase does not really exist in publicly developed civic technology. In that, I mean, it is not likely that a great piece of technology will go unnoticed simply because it was not able to reach other people. Civic technologies developed in the public sector can be easily rolled out into use across government agencies and advertised through all the means that the government already advertises so many other projects. This is especially true in Pakistan as the government commonly runs TV ads. The ‘sink or swim’ factor of these technolgies is really UX, and the quality of the technology itself.

  1. International Labour Organization, ILOSTAT database. Data retrieved on February 8, 2022↩︎

  2. Pakistan Institute of Development, Staff Report. September 28, 2021.↩︎

  3. Faridi, Zahir Muhammad, Malik, Shahnawaz, et al. Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences (PJSS) Vol. 29, Retrieved on May 2, 2022.↩︎

  4. Knoema, World Data Atlas, Demographics database. Data retrieved on May 2, 2022↩︎

  5. Sakiko Tanaka and Maricor Muzones. ADB Briefs No. 70. “Policy Brief on Female Labor Force Participation in Pakistan.” Retrieved May 2, 2022↩︎

  6. Syed Mubashir Ali, Rizwan ul Haq. “The Pakistan Development Review, Spring 2006”. Retrieved on May 5, 2022.↩︎

  7. The World Bank, World Development Indicators (2018). GNI per capita, Atlas method. Retrieved on May 7, 2022↩︎

  8. Planning Commission, Pakistan 2025 - One Nation One Vision. Retrieved on May 7, 2022↩︎

  9. Leibbrandt, A., & List, J. A. (2015). Do women avoid salary negotiations? Evidence from a large-scale natural field experiment. Management Science, Retrieved on May 7, 2022↩︎

  10. “Global Digital Overview”. DataReportal – Global Digital Insights. Retrieved May 8, 2022↩︎