Gender at Work 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 invisibilize the work and employment of women and transgender persons while normalizing 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 labor, home-based industrial outwork, and domestic and unpaid care work. In line with transnational feminist thought, this book contextualizes gendered laboring practices while 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 ‘victimized’ Southern or Muslim women.

Informed by disciplines including organization 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.