Shahid Khalil


Women in Pakistan are certainly not treated fairly either in the urban or rural area. The discrimination against them is particularly stark in the rural regions, where the incidence of poverty is also very high.

However, as the world celebrates International Women's Day, Pakistani women from rural regions have shown increasing confidence as they become aware of their rights. "I believe that a woman must be educated and must work in order to prove herself in society and to be a better mother", said Zaibunisa a young and hardly educated woman from Dera Bugti. Women should work insisted Fatima Bi who works at a garment factory in a village near Lahore. "Why should I stay at home if I can work outside" she asked. "I should also earn income and my people and I should enjoy the money I can make," she added.

"Those days where our mothers had to ask for money from our fathers, even for simple things like underwear are gone: we need our own money and this means that we should work" she said. This is a good omen but there is still a long way to go.

Female farmers and entrepreneurs have less access to land than their male counterparts. Similarly, both the demand for and use of credit are lower among female farmers and entrepreneurs than among their male counterparts. These differences are rooted in failures of markets and institutions and in their interactions with household responses.

For example, accessing credit often requires collateral, preferably land or immobile assets. Women are, thus, at a disadvantage because they have lower or less secure access to land and are disproportionately employed in the service sector where capitalization is lower and output is often intangible. These forces may be further reinforced by gender-based preferences in the households that can lead to unequal resource allocations (of land, for example) to male and female members.

The combined forces of markets, service delivery institutions, and income growth that have contributed to closing gender gaps in education, and labour force participation for many women have not worked for everyone. For poor women and for women in very poor places, sizable gender gaps remain. And these gaps are even worse where poverty combines with other factors of exclusion - such as ethnicity, caste, remoteness, race, disability, or sexual orientation.

Even in education, where gaps have narrowed in most countries, girls' enrollment in primary and secondary school has improved little in many Sub-Saharan countries and some parts of South Asia. School enrollments for girls in Mali are comparable to those in the United States in 1810, and the situation in Ethiopia and Pakistan is not much better. In many countries, gender disparities remain large only for those who are poor. In both India and Pakistan, while boys and girls from the top income quantile participate in school at similar rates, there is a gender gap of almost five years in the bottom income quantile.

Beyond the poor, gender gaps remain particularly large for groups for whom ethnicity, geographical distance, and other factors (such as disability or sexual orientation) compound gender inequality. Almost two-thirds of out-of school girls globally belong to ethnic minority groups in their own countries. The illiteracy rate among indigenous women in Guatemala stands at 60 per cent, 20 points above indigenous men and twice the rate of non-indigenous women. For these severely disadvantaged groups - which can be pockets of disadvantage or entire swaths of countries or regions - none of the forces that favor educating girls and young women are working. So, the growth in aggregate income may not be broad-based enough to benefit poor households. Market signals are muted because economic opportunities for women do not expand much or because other barriers - such as exclusion caused by ethnicity, race, or caste - get in the way of accessing those opportunities.

In agriculture and entrepreneurship, large and significant gender disparities in access to inputs (including land and credit) and in asset ownership are at the root of the gender productivity gap. Indeed, yield differences for female and male farmers disappear altogether when access to productive inputs is taken into account. Differences in access to inputs may be further compounded by differences in the availability of "market time," as noted above, which can make the same investment less productive for women than for men.

In much of the world, women have less input than men in decision making in their households, in their communities, and in their societies. Consider women's underrepresentation in formal politics, especially in its upper reaches. Fewer than one-fifth of all cabinet positions is held by women. And women's lack of representation extends to the judiciary and labor unions.

These patterns do not change much as countries get richer. The share of women parliamentarians increased only from 10 per cent to 17 per cent between 1995 and 2009.

Sometimes service delivery institutions fail, for young girls and women during childbirth. Other times markets do not work well, with results that are worse for women, as illustrated by evidence of discrimination in both labor and credit markets. Often reinforcing these market failures, however, are formal institutions that treat women and men differently. Laws and regulations can constrain women's agency and opportunities more than those of men, as when women and men have different ownership rights, or when restrictions are placed on hours and sectors of work for women but not for men. Where credit and labor markets already discriminate, such unequal laws and regulations can accentuate the problem. Unequal treatment may also manifest itself more indirectly through biased service delivery, as is the case for agriculture extension services. Here, institutional bias and market structure (with women underrepresented in nonfood crops that are often the target of extension services) reinforce and even deepen inequalities.

Addressing gender gaps in human capital endowments - excess female mortality at specific periods of the life cycle and pockets of gender disadvantage in education - requires fixing the institutions that deliver public services. Providing basic services in a timely manner to expectant mothers and improving the availability of clean water and sanitation to households will go a long way to closing the gender gaps in excess mortality.

Education services need to focus on improving access for the significant population groups that are currently disadvantaged by poverty, ethnicity, caste, race, or geography. Such a focus will help address the "gender inequality traps" that affect the poor and excluded in society.

Improving the delivery of maternal care is hard, but it can be done - even at relatively low incomes, as Sri Lanka and Malaysia show. From more than 2,000 per 100,000 births in the 1930s, the maternal mortality ratio in Sri Lanka fell to about 1,000 by 1947, and then halved to less than 500 in the next three years. By 1996, it had fallen to 24. In Malaysia, it halved from 534 over the seven years from 1950 to 1957. Then, with a halving every decade or so, it came down to 19 by 1997.

To overcome the range of institutional obstacles that hampers the effective workings of health systems, Sri Lanka and Malaysia adopted integrated and phased approaches. And they did this with modest total public expenditures on health - 1.8 per cent of gross domestic product, on average, since the 1950s.

Health programs in both countries exploited synergistic interactions of health care with basic education, water and sanitation, malaria control, and integrated rural development - including building rural roads, which helped deal with obstetric emergencies. Financial, geographic, and cultural barriers to maternal care were addressed by ensuring a front line of competent, professional midwives widely available in rural areas, providing them with a steady supply of drugs and equipment, linking them to back-up services, and improving communication and transportation. Simultaneously, facilities were strengthened to provide obstetric care and deal with complications.

Better organizational management improved the supervision and accountability of the providers. Area specific mortality data were provided through monitoring systems so that empowered communities could hold political leaders accountable and national and sub national actors were forced to recognize the unacceptability of every maternal death. Finally, both countries were strongly committed to improving the status of women: women gained voting rights before or soon after national independence, and female education received special attention.

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