Job quotas for women abolished

The head of a special government-appointed commission on women said on Tuesday that she was concerned by a recent government decision to abolish a five percent job quota for women in the public sector, which contradicted the recommendations made by the commission in a report published late last year. "There's a government handout, or some sort of a statement, [that says] that they have already done it. I asked for an explanation and they said, 'Well, the quota was fixed by an executive order and that's why we've cancelled it, and we want a higher percentage'," Justice Majida Rizvi, the chairwoman of the National Commission on the Status of Women (NCSW), told IRIN from the north-western city of Peshawar where she was due to deliver a lecture on women's issues. "I'm really so perturbed that, after the report came out, they've done it," she added. Launched in December 2003, the NCSW report, titled "Inquiry Report on the Status of Women's Employment in Public Sector Organisations," was supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) under a project on gender and governance. It quotes the government's National Plan of Action (NPA) as focusing on "enhancing women's representation in all public, semi-autonomous and government corporations to 25 percent." But Rizvi said that, despite NCSW recommendations that women be given a 33 to 50 percent job quota in the public sector, even the five percent quota, previously in vogue, had been abolished by the government, ostensibly with the view to eventually implementing a higher percentage of jobs reserved for women. "When I spoke to Nelofar [Bakhtiyar - the PM's special advisor on women development] she said, 'This is an executive order which is why we've finished it. We want to fix a higher quota'," Rizvi continued. "However, I know nothing is going to be done. You see, they could have asked even the provincial governments, those who had not endorsed it, to endorse at least a five percent quota till they could fix a higher quota. All that is gone now," she stressed.