After a recent survey revealed that over one-third of Pakistani women qualified as doctors are not practising medicine, an ever more troubling statistic comes from employment data in the engineering field — over 71% of women with engineering degrees are unemployed. However, like women doctors, a substantial share of the women are not actually unemployed, but are either wilfully not practising, or are employed in other fields. Also like women doctors, a vast majority of these women only pursued an education in engineering-related fields — often heavily subsidised by the taxpayer — to improve their marriage prospects. Indeed, almost two-thirds of the women engineers who are not working in their field are married.
Government subsidies are supposed to benefit everyone, not individuals. While direct recipients will usually benefit more, and sometimes even disproportionately, indirect benefits are always visible, such as how subsidised foods crops help keep consumer prices low while making wealthy men out of some large landholding farmers. But wasted education subsidies bring no benefit to the rest of the country. The only people gaining are the recipients, and perhaps their husbands. Meanwhile, thousands of women who actually are interested in pursuing engineering-related professions are left out in the cold because spots were taken up by people who always intended to waste them.
It is essential for the government to come up with some sort of bond that would require recipients of subsidised education in high-demand fields such as medicine and engineering to either work in their fields for a certain number of years, or pay a large penalty. Exemptions could be created for people who can prove they were legitimately unemployed, but nobody has a right to essentially defraud taxpayers of millions of rupees, especially when the government is already struggling to fund education at every level. Anyone who wants an advanced degree as a dowry item should waste their own money on it.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 29th, 2023.
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