Sex segregation in the public sector in Pakistan : gender training, representation, resources, and patriarchy

This thesis examines the problem of sex segregation in the public sector of Pakistan in relation to the increasingly applied development solution of gender training of public sector employees. The three main labour market theories of sex segregation - social, economic and political - and the parallel development approaches, that is, Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Development (GAD), consider the solution to the problem of sex segregation in the labour market to be, respectively, the integration of women in institutions, women's access to economic resources, and the reorganisation of gender relations through dismantling entrenched patriarchy. In practice, the social approach of gender training has increasingly become the development solution and there is a belief that training will result in institutional transformation and the elimination of gender inequality. The research for this thesis was concerned with how gender training relates to the problem of sex segregation in terms of issues of women's low representation, access to resources, and institutional policies and practices. The research interviewed 198 public sector employees in Pakistan to seek opinions on women's representation, the changes and policies required in the public sector and actual changes in practices after gender training. The data captured the diversity of views of male and female employees both with and without gender training, belonging to two geographic locations, 10 organisations, and at three levels within the organisations. The research found that training provoked resistance to women's representation and access to resources and did not result in changes in practices of research participants, which continued to be determined by institutional inertia owing to unchanged organisational policies. There was a contest between the opposing interests of men and women about the issues of women's representation and access to resources. While both men and women opposed increased representation of women in organisations through quotas, women asked for greater access to institutional and social resources but men in similar positions opposed it, suggesting gender inequality is inherently political. Patriarchal benevolence was shown by men in senior management positions in their support for increased women's representation and resources, because their elite status was not challenged by interventions at the lower level. Further, gender training did not transform organisational practices and gender- trained research participants returned to work in the existing patriarchal framework of the public sector. These findings seek a refocus of development interventions by suggesting that more and better training cannot cure the problem of sex segregation, nor do social and liberal theories of sex segregation offer a solution to the problem of sex segregation, because women's low representation and limited access to resources are not causes of sex segregation, as assumed by the social and economic theories of sex segregation in the labour market, but are effects of the patriarchal control of institutions, as argued in the political theories of sex segregation in the labour market. While training is important, the problem first requires a change in the patriarchal processes, policies and procedures that disenfranchise women