Survey Reveals Over 70% of Female Pakistani Engineers Remain Unemployed

Approximately 70% of female engineering graduates living in Pakistan are either unemployed or not in the labor force, according to analysis of the labor force survey 2020–21. Only 8,146 (28 %) of the 28,920 female engineering graduates were employed, while 6,054 (20.9 %) were unemployed and 14,720 (50.9 %) were not in the labor force.

This was found in a joint study by Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE, which used data from the latest Labor Force Survey on the employment status of female engineering graduates, including those who have earned a bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, or master’s degree in any engineering discipline.

The data analysis for the three groups (employed, unemployed, and out of labor force) by location (rural and urban) reveals that 78.9 percent of engineering graduates lived in urban areas and about 21.1 percent of them lived in rural areas across the nation.

According to the data analysis, 43.9 percent of engineering graduates in the rural area were working, while about 36.3 percent were unemployed.

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In the rural area, the percentage of engineering graduates choosing not to enter the workforce was significantly lower (19.8%) than the national average (50.9%).

About 24.0% of female engineering graduates in metropolitan areas were employed, according to the analysis, while 16.8% were unemployed. At over 59.2 percent, the majority of female engineering graduates in the urban area are still unemployed.

The employment chances for female engineering graduates are much higher in urban areas (67.2%) than in rural areas (32.8%), according to a comparison of the numbers of employed engineering graduates by region.

Compared to those in urban regions (63.5 percent), the percentage of unemployed engineering graduates was lower in rural areas (36.5 percent). On the other hand, of 14,720 engineering graduates who are unemployed overall, the majority live in cities (91.8%) as opposed to rural areas (8.2%).

It is important to note that of the engineering graduates who chose not to enter the workforce, almost 64.2% were married, and 28.42% had never married.

According to the age group research, the age group of 25–34 years old accounts for the largest percentage of all female engineering graduates (50.9 %), followed by the 35–44 age group (21.7 %).

“A trained and educated female being unemployed or not interested in work is a major issue requiring dialogue and discussion in Pakistan,” stated Bilal Gilani, Executive Director of Gallup Pakistan. According to this study, just 3 out of 10 female engineers are employed, and the remaining 7 are not.

The average subsidy for an engineer out of a government university is as much as Rs. 5 million. The government’s expenditure of Rs. 5 million is a sunk cost if these female graduates do not find employment. Policymakers and taxpayers whose money is being wasted should be concerned about this in a resource-constrained nation like Pakistan.

Half of all female engineering graduates choose to stay out of the workforce, and the vast majority of these graduates who choose to stay out of the workforce live in cities and are married, according to Dr. Umer Khalid, Director of PRIDE.

This suggests that professional education is becoming more and more common among those who want to improve their chances of getting married. To guarantee value for money, the government must examine the seat-allocation strategy, at the very least in public engineering colleges and universities.

In order to provide more policy circles in Pakistan with usable and pertinent economic and social research data, Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE have partnered to evaluate and distribute it.

The Labor Force Survey 2020–21, a nationwide survey carried out by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) to gather data on the labor market, will be the subject of the current series of reports. Nearly 99,900 families in Pakistan provided data for the survey, which produced district-level representative results for the first time. With a regional split, Pakistan is the subject of our current analysis.