"Neoliberalism, Sacrifice, and the Second Shift: Women’s Struggle with Paid and Unpaid Labor in Pakistan

• In Event: 40201 - Diverse Perspectives on Care Work

Abstract

While economic power is often heralded as a key pathway to women’s empowerment, their ability to achieve it continues to be stymied by the persistent burden of domestic work and care responsibilities. In the Global South, this dilemma is compounded by neoliberal reforms, which pull women into wage work while simultaneously dismantling traditional relational support systems such as the extended family system, which can ease women’s caregiving burdens. How, then, do women in these contexts navigate the demands of paid and unpaid labor? Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork and 80 interviews with frontline workers in Karachi, Pakistan —whose irregular work schedules often conflict with household and caregiving duties—I found that Pakistani women address the impossible dual burden by relying on three kinds of sacrificial roles to alleviate their workload: (1) sacrificial daughters, young girls who forgo education for household duties; (2) propitiatory sisters, women who abandon personal aspirations, including marriage, to support their parents and siblings; and (3) part-time wives, women who accept polygynous marriage in order to fill breadwinning roles for parents and siblings. These findings expose the hidden cost behind the neoliberal narrative of women’s empowerment: women’s entry into wage work is often contingent upon female sacrifice. I use these insights to critically examine the paradoxical relationship between neoliberalism and women’s empowerment through work.

Author

• Fauzia Husain, Queen's University