The geography of women’s paid work in Punjab tells an uncomfortable story:

Pakistan is too large for any national or even province wide analysis to be good for policy action.

Look at Punjab and how the paid work situation looks for women.

This is where Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics is plugging the gap.

District wise data shows that females reporting to work for pay can vary widely from as high as 58% in Bahawalnagar to less than 2% in Bhakkar

The geography of women’s paid work in Punjab tells an uncomfortable story: it’s not where opportunity is highest, it’s where poverty is deepest (however the relationship works for most districts but not for all both top and bottom are dominated by poorest districts)
.
Bahawalnagar (58.0%) and Lodhran (54.2%) top the list of districts reporting that a female household member works for pay, nearly triple the provincial average of 19.8% (n=5,213). Dera Ghazi Khan (39.6%), Rahim Yar Khan (32.5%), and Rajanpur (24.3%) round out a clear pattern: South Punjab dominates this indicator almost entirely, while wealthier, more urbanized districts like Lahore (14.2%), Faisalabad (9.4%), and Gujrat (5.9%) sit well below average.

This isn’t a story of South Punjab offering women more economic opportunity. It’s a region with some of the province’s highest poverty rates, weakest infrastructure, and lowest human development indicators. When household income from male earners isn’t enough to survive on, women’s labor becomes a necessity, not a choice exercised within a household that could afford otherwise.

The inverse pattern in better-off districts supports this reading. Where household income is more secure, female labor force participation drops sharply, not because women there have less ambition or fewer skills, but because the economic pressure forcing the decision simply isn’t there, and prevailing norms default to keeping women out of paid work once it’s optional.

In other words, female work in much of Punjab looks less like progress toward gender parity in the labor market and more like a last-resort response to economic precarity. The places where women work the most are the places households can least afford for them not to.

This complicates how we read participation numbers alone. A 58% figure should prompt the question of what’s underneath it: agency, or absence of alternatives.