FEMALE LEADERSHIP, INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SDG 16 IN PUNJAB, PAKISTAN: UNRECORDED REASONS AND THE GAP BETWEEN POSITION AND INFLUENCE

Abstract

Pakistan reserves seats for women in its legislatures, appoints women as deans and directors in its universities and sets gender quotas in some ministries, yet women hold less than five per cent of senior positions in public institutions and the country’s scores on institutional and gender indicators remain near the bottom of international rankings. This article asks what stands between a senior post and the power to decide, and whether that obstacle takes the same form across different kinds of institution. It draws on one part of a multi-site phenomenological study of sixty women leaders in Punjab: twenty in public-sector universities, twenty in political and policy-making institutions and twenty in the Punjab Police. Interviews of fifty-five to ninety-five minutes used a single twenty-question semi-structured guide and were analyzed through interpretive phenomenological analysis, with themes generated by the six-phase procedure of Braun and Clarke (2006). The analysis reported here covers nineteen accounts of nineteen participants: fifteen describing barriers and the strategies used against them, and four comparing the three fields. Three results follow. First, the distinction between formal and informal institutions does not fit these accounts. In every case the formal process exists and runs: the committee meets, the posting board sits, the party has rules and offices. What is informal is not the process but the reasoning behind the decision, and one participant states the consequence exactly when she says that neither reason is ever put in writing, so it is not open to challenge. The operative distinction is therefore between decisions whose reasons are recorded and decisions whose reasons are not. Second, informational exclusion is a mechanism, distinct from the denial of resources or of network access: one officer can see her formal record but not the informal one, because it is made in rooms she is never invited to. Third, the gap between holding a post and deciding an outcome appears in all three fields in different forms, and individual navigation does not close it. Of the fifteen barrier accounts only three describe an attempt to change a rule or create a record. The contribution is a revision of feminist institutionalism for this setting, from formal against informal to recorded against unrecorded reasons.