VIEW: Gender reforms in Pakistan –Syed Mohammad Ali
Gender roles and responsibilities are easily ingrained in culture and tradition, and thus altering notions of gender is readily subject to resistance and suspicion by all sorts of preservers of the status quo.
A country like ours does not stand a serious chance of becoming prosperous until we realise the value of adequately empowering the ‘other’ half of the population, the women of Pakistan. Besides the need to assure women’s basic human rights, the economics benefits of gender empowerment are also enormous.
National output and household incomes increase automatically with more women working. There are accompanying social benefits related to this economic empowerment as well. Experience from around the world indicates that increased women’s control over resources has a positive impact on child survival, nutrition levels, and school enrolments. This is because women tend to invest more in the human capital of their children than men do. The implications of this trend on long-term development outcomes should be obvious enough.
Yet empowering women is not so easy. Anyone who has worked on such issues could identify a range of hurdles which have undermined their efforts. Broadly speaking, gender roles and responsibilities are easily ingrained in culture and tradition, and thus altering notions of gender is readily subject to resistance and suspicion by all sorts of preservers of the status quo. Sometimes the elders of a community oppose altering the traditional status of women; at other times it is the more firebrand youth who resist female empowerment in the name of conservatism.
Some of the resistance to changing gender roles comes from women themselves, who are reluctant to transgress age old social boundaries like restricted social mobility and public segregation on the basis of sex.
It is no wonder that Pakistan scores quite poorly on composite measures like the Gender Equity Measure. Our female labour force participation in the formal sector is about 15 percent, whereas in neighbouring Bangladesh this participation is nearly four times as much. Increasing women’s participation in the national workforce is deterred due to varied restrictive socio-cultural restrictions. However, practical issues such as the prevailing level of illiteracy amongst women also compound their inability to secure formal sector employment.
Gender empowerment in Pakistan further requires addressing numerous institutional biases. Pakistan is a signatory to various international commitments including the ‘Convention on elimination of all forms of discrimination against women’ and the ‘Universal declaration of human rights’. The government has also prepared a national policy and a plan of action for development and empowerment of women.
The government claims that these efforts have gradually begun bearing fruit. For example, enrolment gaps are said to have declined significantly over the past few years. Statistics indicate that female enrolment has increased from 38 to 47 percent over the past five years. The Pakistan government is now trying to engender governance structure at all federal and provincial levels. This effort is being made through a Gender Reform Action Plan (GRAP), which was introduced under a decade long Medium Term Development Framework prepared by the Planning Commission of Pakistan in 2005.
The GRAP initiative aims to create space for women within the existing systems while trying to improve the efficiency of the system. In four broad categories of reforms, a number of relevant activities have been identified by GRAP. At the policy level, GRAP hopes to rewrite the National Policy for Development and Empowerment of Women and incorporate gender specific recommendations in the Poverty Reduction Strategy of the country. Some key measures to enhance women’s political participation imply undertaking activities that encourage women’s voting, registration of more women voters.
Within parliaments, the GRAP proposes to try and support elected women to become speakers or deputy speakers, and it advocates the need for a quota for induction of women into the Economic Council. GRAP further wanted to address women’s issues in political party manifestos, and bolster the women’s wing in political parties. A gender review of federal legislation and concurrent lists is another GRAP proposal. GRAP aims to undertake these reforms right down to the local government level.
Thus far, however, GRAP has been unable to link up adequately with a range of donor supported devolution programmes working around the country to achieve its goals.
In terms of institutional restructuring, GRAP wants to update organisational structures of government to include gender perspective in mainstream functions, which in turn imply amending rules of business in selected ministries to emphasise a proactive approach towards gender equality. For example, there is a plan to separate the women and social development sections in five key ministries to create capacity for gender specific planning and implementation. The establishment of public career development and information service is also worth mentioning, where the objective is to undertake affirmative advertising of available government posts to help women candidates secure decision making posts. Improving basic office facilities for women including provision of basic things such as female lavatories in government offices is being considered as is the attempt to enforce a code of ethics regarding sexual harassment at the workplace. Here again, GRAP does not seem to have the required leverage within the public services to be able to accomplish these reforms.
Furthermore, GRAP aims at modification of budgetary processes to include the instruction that all expenditure estimates of education and health be submitted with clear indication of their intended targeting and impact of women and men. In this regard as well, GRAP seems to lack adequate integration with the Gender Responsive Budgeting Initiative sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme, which could have allowed it to expedite its stated gender sensitive budgetary reforms.
While the project has nominated gender focal persons in selected ministries for coordinating gender activities, in view of the ambitious scope of the project and the overarching hurdles it will face, the impact of the proposed GRAP objectives will be seriously curtailed unless much greater synergy with other existing efforts working on gender equity issues is created. .
Given that there are several other relevant efforts working on different aspects of gender empowerment, an initiative like GRAP should be working in conjunction with these efforts, to avoid duplication and instead help accomplish its own ambitious agenda.
Source: Daily Times
Date:7/17/2007
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