Comments on "Discrimination in the Pakistan Labour Market: Myth and Reality".

While the paper critiqued by the author addresses the issue of labor market discrimination it fails to focus upon the salient and pertinent issues at hand. The paper instead focuses mainly upon problems of underenumeration of womens work and argues that inadequate coverage of womens employment in official statistics has created or contributed to the myth that women do not work. To substantiate this position the author then lists areas of womens involvement in productive activity to show that they are involved in all sectors of the economy. Womens contributions are however widely acknowledged while underreporting has been debated as an issue. Furthermore the author of the critique queries how underreporting may be considered discrimination; if anything the phenomenon is a bias and failure of policymakers to collect pertinent data and not due to the labor market discrimination and more typical in Western countries than in Pakistan. In the latter the notion that women receive lower wages than men is seen as a myth while the segregation of women into certain occupations is largely attributed to cultural constraints. The author also holds that it would have been good to incorporate premarket discrimination in the paper discussed whereby 1 group does not have access to factors such as education and skill training.