PESHAWAR, June 14: The womenfolk engaged in service and business sectors do not feel at ease in a male-dominated environment. Most of women who deal with people at offices face frightening working conditions.

According to a survey conducted by Dawn, besides social barriers and conservative values in the province, on-the-job problems created by male colleagues and lack of sense of security are some of the pressing problems hindering the female workers.

Interviews with seven working women, from different fields, revealed that female workers in the NWFP were carrying out their jobs under pressing circumstances.

“They (men colleagues) give respect to women but they never accept them as one of them,” said Ayesha Ehsan, assistant director, Environmental Protection Agency, NWFP.

The interviewees involving a banker, an auditor, a sweeper, a housemaid and provincial government employees expressed a host of problems, identical in nature and proportion, they face while performing their duties.

Describing the atmosphere in offices as uncongenial for working women, a female officer of the provincial government said, “If a woman wants to have a good working relationship with her male colleagues, very soon other men start thinking she was having an affair (with this or that colleague); and they start taking liberties with her.” She added that “here, the social norms don’t allow men and women to work together.”

Sharing her experience, she said male bosses also usually tried to take liberties with subordinate female workers.

Compelled by her family’s poor financial position and feeding her children, a woman in her 40s, who is serving as a housemaid for last 10 years, said despite the fact that she was a grandmother, she still came across eve-teasers.

Ayesha Ehsan said unmarried working ladies faced problems greater in proportions than the married female workers — a point also voiced by a female banker while talking to this scribe.

The boss bug them in different ways like calling them again and again in the office just for nothing.

In some instances, said a working lady, women workers forced by their poor financial conditions to work, were harassed and abused in many respects by their male colleagues.

Apart from taking care of their responsibilities at their workplaces, married working women, said another female worker, had to simultaneously perform as a housewife, do all the household work after attending their offices.

“Her social life is almost finished,” said a woman holding important responsibility in a public sector bank. “It is very difficult for a working woman to give time to her children and husband,” she added.

Another female worker said, “If a husband has problems at office, he will take it out on his wife but it is not possible the other way round. Besides, if a wife is enjoying a better position, the husband becomes complex ridden.”

A female teacher told Dawn that she had to lose her first job, at an Islamabad college, only because she faced hail lot of problems while living alone in Islamabad.

“Ultimately I left the government job,” she said, observing that “it becomes immensely difficult for a female worker when she gets transferred to far off areas because in our conservative society if a working woman is living alone then it’s very easy for others to indulge in her character assassination.”

A working woman, performing as an accountant in a government department, said: “A woman is never accepted by her male colleagues, they hesitate to give her any responsibility.”