Counting women in

Few numbers in the new Labour Force Survey moved as much as this one. Female labour force participation rose from 21.4 to 24.4 per cent between 2020–21 and 2024–25: three percentage points in four years. The labour force as a whole grew by 13.8 million people over the same period. This issue's lead story reports that real wages fell by roughly 13 per cent over the same four years. When one wage buys less, another member of the household goes to work.

Who is joining the workforce?

The increase reaches rural and urban areas alike. Rural female participation rose from 28.0 to 31.7 per cent over the four years. Urban participation rose from 10.0 to 13.4 per cent, a climb nearly as large. Rural women still supply most of the national increase, for the simple reason that three out of five Pakistani women live in rural areas. The divide in levels remains one of the starkest in the survey: a rural woman is more than twice as likely to be in the labour force as an urban one. Measured women's work in Pakistan is overwhelmingly rural work: farms, livestock, home-based production. In urban areas, where the formal jobs of an export-led economy would appear, only about one working-age woman in six is in the labour force at all.

The increase can also be placed on the map, at least by province. Punjab's women gained most — from 29.9 to 32.3 per cent among women aged fifteen and over — with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa next; Sindh barely moved, and Balochistan not at all. At first glance that looks like education paying off, because Punjab's women are also the country's most educated.

The survey's own records say otherwise. Each woman in the microdata carries both her schooling and her work status. That makes it possible to ask, for every level of education, what share of women were in the labour force four years ago and what share are now. It reached every rung of the ladder, but not evenly. The largest gains came in the middle: rural women who had finished primary school, matric or intermediate each gained between eleven and thirteen points. The smallest came at the ends. Women with no schooling gained about four points, in rural and urban areas alike. Women with a degree gained less than the middle in rural areas, and in urban areas nothing at all: urban graduate participation was 32.5 per cent four years ago and is 32.3 now. The rise is not concentrated where education is highest. Taken across the country, graduates show the smallest rise of any group: up less than two points in four years. The rise does not follow education. It likely follows the squeeze on household incomes. Three rural women in five have never finished primary school, so even their four-point rise supplies the biggest single block of the country's new female workers.

Who is counted?

Before celebrating or lamenting a participation rate of 24.4 per cent, it is worth asking what it counts. The survey uses the international definition of employment, which includes work most people never think of as a job: unpaid labour on a family farm, tending livestock, piece-rate stitching done at home for a contractor. Unpaid family helpers alone are 19.1 per cent of all recorded employment in Pakistan — one worker in five earning no wage at all — and women are concentrated in exactly these categories.

That has two consequences. First, some of the recorded rise is not new work but better counting: a woman who has always worked unpaid on the family plot is now captured by a better-prompted questionnaire.

Second, the level itself depends on where the survey draws the line between work that counts as employment and work that does not. Under the old standard, growing wheat or raising livestock counted as employment whether the produce was sold or eaten at home. The survey's new 19th ICLS standard draws the line at sale: work whose output is mainly sold is employment; the same work, done mainly for the household's own use, is classed as own-use production and sits outside the labour force altogether. Housework and care were never counted under either standard — the change concerns the production of goods. For women the gap between the definitions is not hypothetical: participation is 24.4 per cent on the old definition and 22.7 on the new. The same women, doing the same day's work — employed if the household sells the milk, outside the labour force if the household drinks it. Every comparison across years in this piece uses the old definition for both years.

The survey does not decide whether women work. It decides whether their work counts.

Will this improve productivity?

What kind of participation is rising decides the answer. More than half of Pakistan's working women are contributing family workers — 55.9 per cent at the last survey's count — and unpaid family helpers are one in five of all employed Pakistanis. The increase recorded here lives exactly where that kind of work lives: rural districts, farms and livestock, households putting more hands to existing work rather than new jobs drawing women in. Participation of this type raises the number of workers without raising output per worker.

The lead story argues that Pakistan's growth adds workers without adding output per worker. Women are the margin where that could change. Participation rising because households are distressed adds labour to the informal, low-productivity corners of the economy — more workers, same engine. Participation rising because jobs exist in firms — formal, capital-equipped, export-oriented — is the only version of this number that raises output per head as it rises. The figure to watch is not 24.4 itself but its composition: how much of next year's increase is wage employment, and how much is another unpaid helper finally counted.