October 22, 2007	Monday	Shawwal 9, 1428

It is now widely accepted that gender disparity is a manifestation of under-development. What is, however, not so widely accepted is that gender disparity is also a potent source of under-development.

Only the most enlightened believe the latter to be true. However, even this segment shies away from pointing out the roots of this core disparity in nations.

It is important to trace the causes, as this discrimination remains at the roots of high population growth; low levels of education, nutrition, and health; and non-availability of the full level of human capital that God may have endowed a nation with but whose potential remains un-/under-developed and untapped.

Unless the root causes are addressed, women’s low status, population growth, social backwardness, and economic under-development will all remain mutually reinforcing as women comprise almost half of the country’s population. We cannot claim to be treading the path to development unless women are carried along towards higher order needs’ fulfilment of self-esteem and self-actualisation. For, development is realisation of potential of all----men and women alike.

It is commonly accepted that, amongst other factors, population growth rate is a function of the empowerment of women. That is, a woman’s say in family decision-making has a direct bearing on family size. It is then said that women should be empowered through education and job opportunities that would also increase the opportunity cost of children. For, women would then have alternative avenues available for time and other resource utilisation. After saying this, the chapter is closed for a sure fire route to empowerment is identified as above that women must now follow if they seek more fulfilled lives. An upshot would be smaller families and lower population growth rate at the national level.

While smaller family sizes are now the norm in educated affluent families due to a host of influences, the women may not necessarily be as empowered as the ‘female empowerment’ thesis would like us to believe. And, job opportunities for women may not necessarily be playing a role in shrinking family sizes at the middle-/upper-middle-income strata of society where marginal utility of women’s income is low.

For, a large number of female doctors and other professionals have to quit jobs for “family reasons.” That is, they acquire professional education for empowerment but are not empowered enough to pursue professional goals at will. Rather, after acquiring all the qualifications, they are relegated to the same stereotypical roles that they would have been assigned to anyways with or without professional education and which roles can be better distributed within the household to enable professional contribution by women.

Women are, therefore, not able to pay back the scarce public resources consumed for their professional education. Family size, in such cases, is perhaps also influenced by the educated male members whose own cost-benefit analysis necessitates smaller families. Woman’s professional education may not be very relevant in such households where a woman is not free to earn and express herself professionally as the family can do without the income she is trained to earn.

Public investment in the professional education of a large number of women, therefore, comprises sunk costs. For such seats could have been better utilised by alternative candidates with greater commitment, vigour, and motivation to pursue professional goals that could translate into national development if the nation offers attractive enough opportunities for their retention on home ground. Even if such graduates migrate, they would still be utilising their skills, developing, realising their potential, and serving and would not be sliding back to low-skill work that can be done regardless.

The thesis regarding the relationship between women’s education, job opportunities, and family size, therefore, needs to be qualified. Job opportunities for women are relevant for low-/low-middle-income households where the family could do with additional income earned by female members of the households. For this segment, educational and job opportunities must be created and popularised so that the female half of the population gains greater control over their individual lives, families, and family size.

At this stratum, women’s education, employment, and empowerment would eventually address the issues of food, education, and health biases against girls found commonly in this stratum otherwise. With the above enabling environment, women will thus be contributing to the nation’s socio-economy in more ways than one.

Paradoxical, however, is the situation in the upper strata of the society where girls experience considerably less food, education, and health discrimination. However, once educated even professionally and ready to start a family, they may experience role discrimination as they are not autonomous enough to freely combine personal and professional lives that many could with ease only if “allowed” to.

This is a blatant lack of confidence in their decision-making ability once again for socio-economic reasons. In this stratum, if there is no economic reason for her to work, she should/may not as her basic task is still believed to be to perform everybody’s chores at home. And, this brings us back to square one.

Why such a large amount of public investment in higher-level female professional education fails to turn over into professional output emanates from the role perceptions about women that the society still has. No matter how high an educational ladder the woman may have climbed, her first home assignment comprises the stereotypical roles that women are expected to play in societies struggling to develop. Gender disparity, therefore, begins at home and that is where it needs to be confronted if the entire human potential in the country is to be tapped and deployed for national development.

To fight gender disparity, there must be an enlightened redistribution and equitable sharing of intra-household roles to extricate younger women from subservience and domination by the old order of conservative men and women alike. It is this highly skewed role distribution within the household that makes women subservient to the extent that they are unable to make career choices for themselves despite their high professional education. The upshot is loss of professional expertise for which the nation paid dearly to no avail.

And, the issue of women’s empowerment and national development remains unaddressed generation after generation as attitudes towards women and their role remain unchanged. With such rampant intra-household gender-based role disparities, Pakistan remains deprived of almost half the human capital it could develop for the benefit of all at the individual, family, and macroeconomic levels.