Trends in Female Employment at the Federal Government Level: A Critical Appraisal of 1983–1989

This paper focuses on two aspects. First, it looks at the trends in female employment at the federal level over a period of six years, from 1983 to 1989, based on data from the Federal Government’s Civil Servants Census Reports, using three years, 1983, 1986, 1989. The second aspect of the paper is to highlight the fact that not all the information that is collected is published gender-wise. This is very important from the point of view of working women as it can also have strong policy implications with regard to the advancement of women for which the Government has set up a separate ministry. The ignorance of the Ministry of Women’s Development about this aspect, that is, of available unpublished information, is surprising. The paper is structured as follows. After a brief discussion of data and methodology, the results are presented in Section 2. Section 3 discusses the data which are collected but not published at the disaggregate level which has adverse implications for women employees at the policy level. The conclusions and policy recommendations are presented in the final and fourth section of this paper. The data used in this paper are taken from the Government of Pakistan (1983, 1986, 1989). The statistics reported in these reports are classified by service groups into Secretariat, Attached Departments, Subordinate Offices, Other Offices, and in the Autonomous/Semi-Autonomous bodies by Basic Pay Scale (BPS) and gender. The Censuses show that for these years no female employee of the regular civil service is reported in BPS-22 for all the categories, and also none is reported in BPS 21 in 1989. Therefore, for this analysis, we group the female employees as between BPS 16–20 instead of BPS 16–22.