Career Constraints Among Women Graduate Students In A Developing Society: West Pakistan: A Study in the Changing Status of Women

Abstract

An effort is made in this paper to determine the degree of change in the status of women that has occurred in a traditional Muslim society where higher education is available to women and which offers preparation for occupational careers as alternatives to marriage. In a study done in 1968, a 50 percent sample of the women graduates was taken from all the Arts and Science departments of the University of Karachi and a 25 percent sample from the University of the Punjab in Lahore, West Pakistan of the class of 1966. Based on fathers’ occupation, the bulk of the students came of upper-middle and upper-class families. The educational achievements of the women graduates not only surpassed that of their mothers, by a wide margin, but that of their fathers. Natural Science graduates had the highest employment rates and the Humanities graduates the lowest, with Social Science graduates falling inbetween. Karachi, as the major industrial and commercial center of the nation offers greater employment opportunity than does Lahore, but the constraints of purdah limit middle and upper class women to those situations where only women are employed. The majority of those employed were teaching at girls’ schools or colleges. The parents of the Lahore graduates were found to be more than twice as conservative as the Karachi parents in the matter of not wanting or permitting their daughters to accept employment, and the majority of both samples permit their daughters to work only under purdah conditions. A modification of Lerner’s typology would indicate that the students’ mothers could be termed “traditional”; those graduates whose families refused to permit them to enter the labor market as “transitionals”, and those who have taken employment as a tentative alternative to marriage as “moderns”.