Gender at Work in Pakistan

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-0-367-50673-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 314 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge ISS Gender, Sexuality and Development Studies

This book analyses the structuring role that gender plays for accessing work, experiencing work, and working conditions in Pakistan.

Considering how these structures have been challenged and changed, the collection provides a fine-grained engagement with the role of gender at work in Pakistan against the backdrop of policy and academic discourses that often invisibilise the work and employment of women and transgender persons while normalising a male breadwinner model and masculine norms in and beyond the workplace. The book engages explicitly with feminist thought from South Asia and informs wider feminist discourses with fresh perspectives from Pakistani thinkers. Chapters straddle the analysis of occupations as diverse as agricultural labour, home-based industrial outwork, and domestic and unpaid care work. In line with transnational feminist thought, this book contextualises gendered labouring practices whilst paying attention to how gendered relations at work are embedded within cross-border dynamics, colonial histories and the global political economy. This wide perspective includes a critical engagement with neoliberal discourses around women’s paid employment as empowerment and the celebration of women’s entrepreneurship. Taking on board how gender can become a resource for resistance, this book counters and complicates the trope of ‘victimised’ Southern or Muslim women.

Informed by disciplines including organisation theory, sociology, economics and social psychology, and including contributions from practitioners, government and NGO workers and academics, this book will be of interest to scholars and professionals concerned with challenging binary notions of gender in the workplace, and how this is complicated through the intersections of gender with ethnic, class, caste, religious, generational and other social divisions and hierarchies in the global South.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Majid, Hadia

Qureshi, Kaveri

Siegmann, Karin Astrid

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Religionssoziologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Entwicklungsstudien
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Islam & Islamische Studien Islam & Islamische Studien
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Internationale Wirtschaft Entwicklungsökonomie & Emerging Markets

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1: “Introducing gender at work in Pakistan”  Part I: Making statistics work for gender analysis  2: “Women’s work and household income in Pakistan”  3: “Exploring the gender bias in Pakistan’s labor statistics”  4: “A situational analysis of female entrepreneurs in rural Pakistan: challenges and way-forward”  Part II: The gendered underbelly of the modern workplace  5: “Becoming a doctor: narratives of professional choice in Pakistan”  6: “The work of war: making soldiers in the Pakistan army”  7: “Agents or victims? The resilience and agency of female home-based workers in football supply chains”  8: “Gender contestations in the political workplace”  Part III: Gender in reproductive work  9: “Negotiating masculinity in a feminized occupation: narratives of male domestic workers employed by foreigners in Islamabad, Pakistan”  10: “Reproduction, domestic service and femininities at work in Lahore”  Part IV: Gendered resistance at work  11: “Gender dimensions of Punjab peasants’ movement: a study in resistance, agency and the gendered limits”  12: “Paid care economy and workers’ power: a study of the Lady Health Workers’ movement in Pakistan”  13: “Earning respect and money: gendered embodiment, sexual labor, and power among gender non-conforming Pakistanis”  Conclusion  Chapter 14: “Towards more dignified work and lives for people of all genders in Pakistan”

Über Autor(innen)

Hadia Majid is Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS. Her research examines gender, labor markets, digital inclusion, and development in the Global South, with a particular focus on women’s work and economic opportunity in Pakistan. She works closely with policymakers and international organizations to translate research into evidence-based policy.

Kaveri Qureshi is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science, and a Co-Director of GENDER.ED, Edinburgh University’s hub for gender and sexualities. She researches intersectional inequalities in health, work and family life, mainly in the UK and South Asia.

Karin Astrid Siegmann works as an Associate Professor in Labor and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS). She holds more than 25 years of experience in the interdisciplinary field of Development Studies, including extensive expertise on and collaboration with partners in Pakistan.