Women’s Autonomy in the Context of Rural Pakistan

The paper explores the elements that constitute women’s autonomy in rural Pakistan. Hitherto most research on women’s status in Pakistan has either been restricted to proxy measures of women’s status generally or to the urban areas. Community or region, each of which has distinctive features, have an overriding influence on this subject. Northern Punjabi women have lower economic autonomy but greater mobility and decision-making authority than women in Southern Punjab. Gender systems at the village level are also important predictors of women’s autonomy. Economic class has a weak and ambivalent influence on women’s autonomy in rural Punjab. Class influences both education and employment of women, these remains the routes to empowerment in rural settings. While most women in rural areas contribute economically, the majority works on the household farm or within the household economic unit. These women do not derive any additional autonomy as a result of this contribution. Paid employment, though offset by other restrictions on poor women, offers greater potential for women’s autonomy. Education, on the other hand, has a lesser influence on female autonomy in the rural Punjabi context.

Pakistani Couples: Different Productive and Reproductive Realities?

Gender systems depict several dimensions of the relations between men and women across different social settings. Mason (1995) has described the complexity of gender systems that encompass concepts such as women’s standing, empowerment, the sexual division of spheres and the rather widely used concept of women’s status. Gender systems in Pakistan are posited to be unequal in favour of men, because of strong patriarchal systems, which ordain that men and older persons make all major decisions. As a result, women’s status is argued to be low in most dimensions poor educational attainment, few economic opportunities apart from family based employment which is largely unpaid and the virtual seclusion of women from the public spheres of life especially those involving financial transactions. Spheres of life are quite separate with men having the primary responsibility of breadwinning and women to be primarily responsible for within household routine chores such as those involving cleaning, cooking, animal care and child care. Men control the major part of decision making and presumably act in their own interest which may not necessarily coincide with women [Folbre (1988)]. Especially in terms of productive decisions but also in reproductive decisions, women necessarily play a subsidiary role which relegates them to a lower position in terms of decision making and control of resources [Dwyer and Bruce (1988)]. This paper looks more closely at the two spheres of production and reproduction in rural Pakistan. It uses responses from matched husbands and wives to test whether in fact there is a difference between spouses in their perceptions, goals/orientation about production and reproduction.

Rural-Urban Fertility Differentials: 1975

This paper is concerned with identifying differentials in levels and patterns of urban and rural fertility in Pakistan, based on Pakistan Fertility Survey data. Findings show that there are marginal differences in the over-all levels of fertility in the two areas. However, younger urban women are reproducing at a higher rate than rural counterparts, whereas older urban women use relatively more contraception and have lower fertility than older rural women

Does Female Education Affect Fertility Behaviour in Pakistan?

The study explores the relationship between female education and fertility in Pakistan and is based on data from the Pakistan Fertility Survey 1975. Only slight differentials were identified between women with no education and those who had primary or less schooling. However, women with more than primary education had notably lower fertility. Also the role of the intermediate variables such as proportions married, length of breast feeding and contraceptive use had significant associations with female education

Schooling opportunities for girls as a stimulus for fertility change in rural Pakistan

This paper tests Caldwell’s mass schooling hypothesis in the context of rural Pakistan. His hypothesis was that the onset of the fertility transition is closely linked to the achievement of “mass formal schooling” of boys and girls. Punjab and Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) were selected for this study because they appear to be on the leading edge of the demographic transition-a transition that has only recently begun-as suggested by rapid recent increases in contraceptive practice. The study covered a range of rural villages or communities with very different socioeconomic and schooling conditions in order to examine the effects of both school access and quality on family-building behavior in Pakistan. The study concludes that gender equity in the schooling environment, as measured by the number of public primary schools for girls in the community or by the ratio of the number of girls’ schools to boys’ schools, has a statistically significant effect on the probability that a woman will express a desire to stop childbearing and, by extension, on the probability that she will operationalize those desires by practicing contraception. Indeed, the achievement of gender equity in primary school access in rural Punjab and NWFP could lead to a 14-15 percentage point rise in contraceptive use in villages where no girls’ public primary school currently exists and an 8 percentage point rise in villages with one primary school for girls. This is entirely supportive of the Caldwell argument that mass schooling is an important determinant of fertility change, particularly when girls are included. It would appear that fertility change will be much more difficult and will come much more slowly when girls are left behind

Informalisation of Women's Work: Consequence for Fertility and Child Schooling in Urban Pakistan

Female employment is considered an important means of lowering fertility through ways such as raising the age at marriage, through influencing desired family size and also through better knowledge and use of contraceptives. Increasing female labour force participation is frequently recommended as a critical policy measure for reducing the birth rate. However the significant inverse relationship between employment and fertility found for developed countries is weak or absent in the case of developing countries [Rodriguez and Cleland (1980)]. More recent evidence indicates that it is not so much employment per se but type of employment which is a critical determinant of reproductive behaviour [United Nations (1985)]. It has been shown that while high status professional jobs are associated with greater influence on women's domestic autonomy and fertility, low paying jobs lead to an increasing burden of work with entirely different implications for fertility and other household related behaviour. In the context of Pakistan, despite two decades of industrial growth and development, official data sources show stagnant and low levels of female labour force participation rates (LFPR) in urban Pakistan. The LFPR for urban women ranged between 3 and 5 percent for the period between 1971 and 1988. Data collection methods of government agencies are known to greatly underestimate female labour force participation (FLFP) particularly in rural areas and in the urban informal sector where the distinction between productive and domestic activities tends to be ambivalent. Evidence from micro surveys indicates, on the contrary, an increasing influx of women in the urban labour market, particularly in the informal sector [Sathar and Kazi (1988); Shaheed and Mumtaz (1981); Bilquees and Hamid (1989)]. A large number are shown to be working in home-based piece-rate employment while domestic service mainly as sweepers, washerwomen, maids, etc................................

Covid-19 and the Opportunity for a Demographic Research Reset

The author sees the current moment as an opportunity to collaborate with other disciplines to tackle social policy, climate change, and political economy discourses

Best Bets: Additional Funding for Family Planning—International evidence on financing of family planning

Additional financing for family planning (FP) in Pakistan is strongly justified, not only to increase contraceptive prevalence, reduce unmet FP need, and avert millions of unwanted pregnancies, but also to reduce maternal mortality and effect improvements in other spheres of development. As a safeguard against unintended fertility, FP contributes to national savings in multiple ways, and additional annual funding of $93 million—or 40 cents per capita—is a relatively minor investment that promises huge dividends

Pakistani Couples: Different Productive and Reproductive Realities?

Gender systems depict several dimensions of the relations between men and women across different social settings. Mason (1995) has described the complexity of gender systems that encompass concepts such as women’s standing, empowerment, the sexual division of spheres and the rather widely used concept of women’s status. Gender systems in Pakistan are posited to be unequal in favour of men, because of strong patriarchal systems, which ordain that men and older persons make all major decisions. As a result, women’s status is argued to be low in most dimensions: poor educational attainment, few economic opportunities apart from family based employment which is largely unpaid and the virtual seclusion of women from the public spheres of life especially those involving financial transactions. Spheres of life are quite separate with men having the primary responsibility of breadwinning and women to be primarily responsible for within household routine chores such as those involving cleaning, cooking, animal care and child care