Gender balancing

If global rankings are taken as a gauge, gender inequality can’t get worse than where the latest World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report puts the country. Pakistan has been placed at 148th rank out of 149 countries in the Global Gender Gap Report 2018. Not much has improved compared to 2006 rankings where the country was at 112th position out of 115 countries.

Let’s look at some nuggets of information from the report. In terms of the region, “Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are the top-ranked countries in the region, having closed just over 72 percent and nearly 68 percent of their overall gender gap, respectively, while the lowest-ranked countries are Bhutan and Pakistan, having closed just under 64 percent and 55 percent of their overall gender gap, respectively”, says the WEF report. What is noteworthy is that Bangladesh and Pakistan at either end of South Asia’s regional ranking spectrum, with Bangladesh leading and Pakistan is lagging.

The rankings are based on measurement across 4 areas that include education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment. Except for its 97th position in political empowerment, Pakistan ranked 139th in educational attainment, 146th in the economic opportunity, 145th in health and survival for disparities between the two genders.

The report highlights that while Pakistan has made some progress this year in wage equality as well as on the educational attainment subindex, the pace of improvement is insufficient to avoid the country being at the lowest position in the global rankings. Moreover, Pakistan is classified among the six countries where the gap is 90 percent or more in terms of managerial opportunities for women. The other five countries are Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. It is highlighted that women hold less than 7 percent of the managerial positions in Pakistan.

On the ghastly performance for gender disparity, the Human Rights Minister, Dr. Shireen Mazari has rejected the WEF report statistics, which some believe hold ground to some extent as clubbing Pakistan with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen makes little sense. There have been some improvements. Key findings of a PBC baseline survey published in 2017 on gender diversity in business sector of Pakistan are such that 50 percent of companies surveyed had gender diversity highlighted as one of their top five core business goals.

Also, 50 percent of the respondent companies had female employees between 10 – 20 percent; however, more than 60 percent of companies face hurdles in attracting new women as employees. Another finding pertained to the training and development of the women workforce where only 50 percent of the companies explore trainings and have mentoring schemes for female employees. Still, women represent only two percent of workforce in supply chain processes as per the survey The number of women on the corporate boards in Pakistan is still negligible, and the PBC survey also pointed out that more than 50 percent of companies surveyed had no women on their boards.

Nonetheless, the absence of a regular data collection and data update leaves little space for the policymakers to discard global rankings. While the government is reported to have gotten in touch with the forum over the issue, it is not a misnomer that gender inequality continues to exist in the country, and Pakistan still has long way to go to close this gap.

In a quest to fix this gender parity, the PTI government in its manifesto says that it will increase female participation in public sector by establishing significant quotas for women in local government and boards of public bodies. However, the promise has remained out of the government’s immediate attention - at least in the first 100 days so far.