Designs at Work

[Music]

i’m a developing economist

my lens to the world is tuned to seeing

constraints i look to understand human

behavior

by analyzing what if any other barriers

driving it

my training has also dried into me the

importance of presenting viable policy

interventions

to address the underlying issue in the

past few years i have been increasingly

focused

on understanding the barriers that

constrains women access

to earn income and in this work i keep

coming back to two principal questions

how do we make it easier for women to

work and what are the designs that work

this interest owes to a confluence of

personal circumstance with a grant

opportunity

i was a young mother working full time

at the lahore university of management

sciences

a leading university in pakistan when i

became involved in the project looking

to map

30 years of data on women’s labor supply

characteristics in pakistan

the work under this project and the

papers subsequently stemmed from it

spoke to me at a deeply personal level

it put my own career choice as permanent

faculty in lums

in a sector that allows for greater time

flexibility with an employer who i found

particularly accommodating

in great perspective i came to a new

appreciation of the struggle that women

consistently

face if they have been given the choice

to work and i chose these words quite

carefully

because this choice to work is not

merely a reflection of a personal desire

to work

or even an economic need to work it is a

balancing act

between the many different struggles

that women face every day

the statistics on women’s work in

pakistan are bleak we rank 150

out of 153 countries on the economic

participation and opportunity index

in the world economic forum’s 2020

global gender gap index

pakistan has one of the lowest female

labor force participation rates in the

world

women are considered secondary workers

do not earn as much

as men and are by and large employed in

precarious often even hazardous work

when it comes to designing interventions

that are looking to improve women’s

access to decent empowering work

we must begin by first describing and

understanding both the individual

and systemic factors that underlie

women’s poor economic status and lack of

opportunities

pakistani women face a multitude of

constraints when they consider

whether and where to work per the latest

pakistan labor force survey

formal female labor force participation

is only at about 22 percent

and these very low rates of

participation are costing us something

like 30 percent

in gdp attempts to improve women’s

participation are varied

one of the most popular ones is actually

vocational training

and here a focal point is to build on

existing skills such as sewing and

embroidery but my own conversations with

field operators that work

in the skills provisioning sector

question

whether we should just be looking to

involve women and work we should really

be focusing on according to them

higher value chains and we really need

to be thinking about the nature of work

that women do

when we start looking at what kind of

work women do a consistent story starts

to emerge

women in pakistan are relegated from

work for working within the home

and they often do so without any sort of

economic compensation

71 percent of women work in agriculture

where the vast majority

work as unpaid family help among those

who work in manufacturing some 79

are working from within the home and

here they have to

fulfill the home responsibilities along

with it with their economic ones

this results in very little leisure time

for these women and causes what we call

time poverty the multitude pulls on

women’s time mean that women only end up

working about 35 hours a week as opposed

to the 51 put in by men

it also means that women end up choosing

occupations that are much more time

flexible

and allow them to take time off if they

have to fulfill

child care responsibilities these sort

of occupations unfortunately don’t pay

as well i

with my significantly higher agency with

than the typical pakistani women

certainly thought about time flexibility

when i was making my own occupational

employment choice one consequence of

working fewer

is that women end up earning a lot less

than men women in pakistan on average

earn only 70 percent of what men do

some may say that this gender gap is

natural women are working for us

they also have lower literacy rates than

men do and so they don’t find that kind

of demand for their labor in higher

paying occupations

however i have found that women with the

same education and even in the same

occupation

don’t earn as much as their male

counterparts

so why are women’s economic and job

outcomes so much poorer than men’s part

of the issue lies in the cultural

context

that reinforces gender roles this

prescribes women to care work

and men to the productive role the

result is that women’s income

is thought of as supplementary and they

are considered secondary workers

they are the among the first to be laid

off during economic downturns

and this holds even if women are the

only breadwinners within the family

one popular intervention here is to

change perceptions

by introducing role models plays dramas

even artwork is often used the challenge

is to make the content locally relevant

and the role models identifiable not

just for the women but also for the men

within the community

another major challenge to women’s work

in pakistan is that they have limited

access to public spaces as well as

public transport

which limits their mobility and also

their networks

in interviews with home-based and

domestic workers we found that while

home-based workers were relying on their

mail came to access markets

domestic workers saw severe curtailment

of the income

because their radius of work was that

much smaller of particular concern

were the stories of harassment that full

body hijabs and their carbs were unable

to prevent

the lahore safe city project look to

improve the safety of commuters by

heightening cctv surveillance

at the same time we need to seriously

consider the needs of the female

pedestrian

it is women who worry more about

adequate street lighting it is women who

worry about safe spaces to wait for

public transport

we don’t even have readily accessible

toilets for women

i distinctly remember driving through

lahore defense during a heavy monsoon

season

completely flabbergasted at seeing a

woman walking in the middle of the road

at first i was really annoyed because

she was hindering traffic when i looked

more closely i realized there was no

sidewalk for her to walk on

and the middle of the road was the only

race portion not flooded with water

our cities are simply not designed for

women and part of this is because we’re

just not used to having or even

imagining women in the public space

limited public space for women

translates into

restricted access to formal credit and

financial institutions

less than five percent of women have an

account in a formal financial

sector institution in pakistan

this reduces women’s ability to set up

and scale up businesses

here the micro finance sector which has

been offering small loans and has been

favoring women has been transformative

more recently there’s also been a

concerted effort to push

digital services that can be availed

from within the home

yet the covert 19 pandemic has

highlighted yet another constraint faced

disproportionately by women connectivity

and access to smart technology

less than 10 of households in pakistan

have internet connections within the

home

yet even within the segment of the

population that is digitally connected

women’s device uses typically limited

and heavily monitored

so even in the best of times women find

it excessively hard to access services

remotely

besides for the low income segment of

the digitally connected population

low literacy among women translates into

an inability to adequately access and

use many digital services

impactful design must take the needs and

constraints of the target population on

board

this has been highlighted time and again

in all manner of

evaluations of interventions from health

to education to vocational training

programs what we have seen

is that we just don’t have the intended

impact

particularly when the beneficiaries are

women unless we’re conversing with these

women maybe even co-designing with them

i never to do as much in my own work my

latest project is a partnership with the

colleagues

who works in human computer interactions

we are designing an app for low-income

low-literate women workers

allowing them to connect with one

another improve their working conditions

and therefore they earn income we are

engaging in a collaborative process

to ensure that the product truly

reflects the user’s needs as well as her

constraints

however it’s not just on field experts

like myself to consider

how we can make it easier and safer for

women to work

each environment has its own challenges

we must all look

inward consider our environments and

take action it could be as simple as

making sure that the men in the

workplace are not

talking over their female colleagues or

that women do not have to walk across

a male dominated floor to access a

bathroom

ultimately good designs will be the ones

that deployed a shared vision of problem

solving

and empathetic action they are inclusive

and they target the marginalized

segments first

whether you’re crafting a financial

services solution

an app or you’re constructing a public

space consider the many challenges that

a woman

and a working woman in particular faces

every day

designed for her creates something that

makes her feel

included and helps her succeed those

are the designs that work

you