35 per cent of female medical graduates are unemployed

Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE have conducted a combined research, revealing that up to 35 percent of female doctors in Pakistan are currently without a job.

The research is based on the Labour Force Survey of 2020-21 and has analysed Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ data on the labour market, collected from 99,900 households.

According to the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council, Pakistan has produced about 200,000 doctors since 1947, half of them being women.

Currently, 104,974 women doctors live in Pakistan of whom 68,209 (65 per cent) are working at private and state-owned medical centres.
15,619 (14.9 per cent) are jobless, while 21,146 (20.1 per cent) are out of the labour force.

Meanwhile, more than 36,000 women doctors are either unemployed or have chosen not to work.

Additionally, as per Bureau of Emigration, since 1970, about 30,000 doctors have left Pakistan, and 1,000 on average will leave every year. Most of them obtained subsidised education from public universities.

The report further highlights that an average private medical university charges more than Rs5 million whereas the government provides the same education for less than Rs1 million. This indicates that taxpayers’ money goes in vain because one in three of the women doctors do not work.

To be precise, Rs200 billion is spent on around 50,000 women doctors that goes wasted.

The survey found that about 28 percent of medical graduates live in rural areas and 72 per cent in urban areas.

In rural regions, 52 percent Pakistan’s medical graduates are employed and 31 percent are not. Lesser people (i.e. 17 percent) in the rural areas opt to remain out of the labour force in comparison to the national average of 20 percent.

On the other hand, 70 per cent of the graduates are employed in the urban area, while less than 9 per cent are unemployed. Here, more than 21 per cent of the medical graduates choose to remain out of the labour force.

78 per cent women in the urban areas have employment opportunities while in rural areas it is as low as 22 per cent.

Nonetheless, joblessness in rural areas is higher in rural areas at 57 per cent and 43 per cent in the urban centres.

Out of the 21,146 women medical graduates who preferred to remain out of the labour force, “their share in cities stands much higher at 76.6 per cent compared to their 23.4 per cent share in rural areas”. And about 76 per cent were married.

54 per cent of the women medical graduates fall in the age bracket of 25-34 years.