URBAN PLANNING

public participation, what about the everyday public inclusion of women? Public spaces are so shrunken that they only accommodate a certain milieu of the population (predominantly male), which is why it’s important to think of enabling and enhancing the public role of women.

The growing economic power of Pakistani women

The data on Pakistani women’s rising economic power is staggering. The female labour force participation rate rose from under 16% in 1998 to a peak of 25% in 2015 before declining slightly once again to 22.8% by 2018. That means there are millions of women who are currently working who might not have been, had labour force participation rates for women stayed the same.

The total number of women in Pakistan’s labour force – earning a wage outside the home – rose from just 8.2 million women in 1998 to an estimated 23.7 million by 2020, according to Profit’s analysis of data from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. That represents an average increase of 4.9% per year compared to an average of just a 2.4% per year increase in the total population. In short, the growth in the number of women entering the labour force is more than twice as high as the total rate of population increase.

All of those women now in the workforce have more purchasing power than ever before. This means that women now exist more openly in the public and as a result require more ownership of the public domain. Since women are a growing part of the workforce, they require public transport, access to roads, access to lunch spaces, and to overall stake a claim on public spaces.

Already Pakistan’s indicators for gender equality are abysmal. Just take a look at the Gender Development Index (GDI), which measures gender gaps in achievements in three basic dimensions of human development: health, education, and standard of living, shows a massive gap. The 2021 female HDI value for Pakistan is 0.471 in contrast with 0.582 for males, resulting in a GDI value of 0.810, placing it into Group 5, making it part of an unenviable group of countries that includes Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Afghanistan. Meanwhile on the Gender Inequality Index, Pakistan ranks 135 out of 170 countries.

One of the best ways to address this is through city planning, where the existence of women and their growing significance needs to actively be taken into consideration. But before we can get into that, there needs to be serious thought put into what public spaces are, what they mean to different groups of people, and how access to them needs to be planned.