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