ISLAMABAD: Over 9 million female labour participation in the country including 7.2 million in agriculture, two million informal sector, 1.4 million in private  and 1.2 million in industrial and one million in government sector.

To increase the female participation in the labour market the government is taking steps for technical programmes and other small business schemes.

The international community stresses more and more the fact that promoting decent work is the only sustainable way out of poverty and in fact a new target was recently introduced in the millennium development goals calling for "full and productive employment and decent work for all".

Talking to APP, Research Officer Afsheen Ashraf working in a project Labour Market Information and Analysis Unit (LMIA) of Ministry for Labour and Manpower here.

She said that Pakistan's female labour force participation rate is still fourth times lower than the male labour force rate of 82.4 percent which was observed in the survey of 2008.

The largest gender gape in labour force participation in urban areas of the country, reflecting the limited job opportunities for women outside the agriculture sector compared to men, she added.

Afsheen said that whereas in rural areas where the agriculture sector provides the majority of jobs for both women and men, gender differences in labour force participation are significantly lower.

To a question, she said it is the responsibility of the policymakers to formate such types of policies to give equal opportunity to both male and female and other facilitation of skilled programmes to compete in the labour market.