The Work We Don’t See: Women Behind Pakistan’s Informal Economy

By Dr. Hadia Majid

Ask a woman in Pakistan whether she works, and she will likely say no. Ask her what she does with her day, and you might hear about the food she prepares for weekly orders, the jewellery she sells to neighbours, the small business she runs quietly from her phone. She does not consider this work. Neither, in many cases, do the surveys that measure Pakistan’s economy.

This gap between what women do and what gets counted is not just a technical problem. It is a reflection of how we have chosen to see — and not see — women’s economic lives. Pakistan’s female labour force participation rate is officially cited as being around 24 percent. While this figure is widely used to describe women’s engagement in the economy, it does not fully capture the reality of women’s work. But the question is not just whether women work. Rather, it is whether the conditions exist for that work to translate into economic agency.

When it comes to unpacking the conditions that enable work itself, mobility constraints, domestic responsibilities, unsafe workplaces, and harassment are all well-known barriers curtailing women’s desire and ability to work. And while these cut across income levels, it is also worth noting that the labour market does not operate in isolation. It is shaped by its complementary markets too. These include the transport sector, the financial sector, the education sector, and the legal system. A woman who cannot travel independently or does not have access to public transport is also a woman who is restricted insofar as where or how far away from home she can work.

Similarly, a woman without a national identity card cannot register a business in her own name. Hence, systems interact, and barriers in one reinforce barriers in others.

The promise of digital technology has offered a way around some of this. If a woman cannot leave the house, the thinking goes, she can still enter the labour market through digital platforms. In practice, this is more complicated. Many women do not have personal access to phones – smart or otherwise.

Moreover, in our context, privacy within the household, and even in the digital realm is limited. And when income flows through digital wallets or mobile accounts that family members can monitor, women can lose control over their own earnings. For many then, shunning digital financial instruments and preferring cash is not a sign of exclusion. It is a deliberate strategy; one that preserves the privacy needed to make independent financial decisions.

Indeed, tools and systems that insist on adoption and use without understanding the underlying constraints and dynamics could well lead to loss of agency and worsening outcomes. In this regard, the most effective interventions are often those that change small things with large downstream effects. The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), for instance, was designed to transfer cash to women in low-income households. One of its less anticipated consequences was that previously unregistered women began obtaining national identity cards in order to access the programme. This administrative step has turned out to be quietly transformative — bringing women into formal systems, creating a paper trail in their name, and opening doors that were previously closed.

The last few years have increasingly witnessed a case for women’s economic participation in the language of returns. Here, there is documented evidence that returns on investment in women are large, not just by virtue of the significant difference that this makes on the margin, but also because of the demonstratable multiplier effects: invest in women, and communities improve, the next generation fares better and the entire economy grows in the long-run. However, this discourse fails to consider one important point. Often the framing shifts responsibility onto the women while leaving the systems around them unchanged. It is not enough to tell women to participate. The question is whether the conditions for participation actually exist.

Women’s access to education, work, and financial opportunity is not primarily an economic strategy. It is a matter of rights. And the enabling conditions for it, including reformed financial systems, documented identity, safe public infrastructure, and childcare, should be framed as policy obligations rather than incentives. Pakistan’s women are already contributing to the economy in ways that go largely uncounted. The work ahead is not to persuade them to participate in the formal market, but rather to build the systems that make participation possible.

The author is Associate Professor and Economics Department Chair at LUMS.