Hiring Women in Pakistan (Revisited)

This post is with reference to AKS’s earlier post (with the masochistic title regarding the employability of women in Pakistan) and the subsequent discussion in the comments.

Ill try and split the issue into two parts.

Express Declarations

Firstly, any business has to make a business decision. It’s not required to presume, contrary to an express indication from a candidate, that the candidate is question is willing to stay post marriage. That would be ridiculous, and the fact that AKS’s firm has done so in the past is down to their own silly unwillingness to believe what they’re told and capitalize on a candidates candour.

Imputing a Motive

Now to impute that eventuality to all female candidates is a trickier issue. From AKS's firm's perspective, they have previously experienced that most of their employed women, from a certain background have followed a certain course. Is that experience, which has proved so damaging to the firm (in the business sense) to be ignored when the firm is required to make a business decision about hiring and firing?

Ill give a slightly different example to try answer that question.

On occasion, multinational companies in Pakistan actually refrain from hiring male candidates from certain, good universities, because those candidates never settle into the company, and always try to hop on to higher paid jobs at smaller local companies after acquiring the credibility stamp from a multinational. In that respect, those candidates are being discriminated against, in that a motive is being imputed to them on the basis of a combination of their gender and educational background.

Those same multinational companies however will hire a lot of ‘vilayat returned’ (‘VR’) women and also middle class women from the same universities, because the companies know that the VR women appreciate the relatively safety guaranteed by a multinational working environment, wheras the middle class women are additionally especially drawn by the pay package. So in this instance, companies are positively discriminating in favor of both sets of women and against equivalent male candidates from certain universities, due to the motives imputed to each group on the basis of their gender and background.

Interestingly, those same women defend the positive discrimination that assisted their recruitment. They argue that it was fair for them to receive preference because criterion such as loyalty, commitment, and a firms previous experience with a certain group of candidates are all relevant factors that should be considered during the recruitment process.

So if all those factors are relevant, they are relevant notwithstanding whether they deliver a result that in effect discriminates for or against women, and AKS is entitled to impute those motives and to judge accordingly.

Conclusion

Interestingly, because AKS’s firm is not a multinational, the issue boils down to making presumptions on a background + gender basis rather than a purely gender basis. In the absence of big pay sums, VR women may stay given a certain working environment (which AKS firm may or may not provide), whereas middle class women seem unlikely to do so. Consequently, the statement in the previous post should have run as follows:

“If you’re a small to medium size firm with relatively shallow pockets (as opposed to a giant multinational), be very wary of hiring unmarried middle class women who haven’t expressly stated/demonstrated their commitment to remaining post marriage, unless you're hiring them as a PR officer or receptionist”

But before I get called whatever stuff I’m about to be called (due to my defense of AKS’s asininely titled and characteristically offensive post), let me reassure readers that my 'generalization' is a work in progress, and is very much open to suggestion and further qualification.