Pakistani labor officials invoke tradition to justify excluding women from agencies

Evidence

When I asked about this division of women’s labor, the director stated that spaces such as labor agencies are no place for women. I was further told that this was a consequence of Pakistan’s ”traditional” society. This was not the case at all labor agencies I visited. On a number of occasions, I saw women (with male chaperones) waiting to be interviewed for transnational contracts, mostly for secretarial, accounting, health-care, and technology jobs in the Gulf and Southeast Asia. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 922

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in how ‘tradition’ is deployed as a flexible ideological excuse, like the immodesty moral panics article.