Despite Pakistan’s dire need for skilled medical personnel, a sizable proportion of female doctors there are unemployed. Given that the Pakistani government provides significant funding to finance medical education in public sector colleges, this situation is especially startling.
A disturbing 35% of Pakistan’s female doctors are unemployed, according to research done jointly by Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE. This information was obtained from the Labor Force Survey 2020–21, which examined data on the labor market from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics with a focus on female medical graduates.
More than 36,000 female doctors in a nation where there is a dire need for trained medical professionals either are unemployed or choose to remain unemployed for a variety of reasons.
The dearth of skilled medical personnel in Pakistan is highlighted by Bilal Gilani, Executive Director of Gallup Pakistan. In Pakistan, there are now 104,974 female medical graduates. Among them, 68,209—or 65%—work in medical facilities that are both privately and publicly owned. However, the poll found that 20.1% (21,146) of female doctors are entirely out of the labor force and 14.9% (15,619) of them are unemployed.
Notably, Pakistan has created almost 200,000 doctors since its founding in 1947, with half of them being women. According to Bureau of Emigration statistics, roughly 1,000 doctors have left Pakistan annually since 1970, totaling almost 30,000 doctors.
Because many of the unemployed female doctors got financial aid to attend public colleges, the problem of their unemployment is particularly alarming. The government offers the same education for less than Rs 1 million, whereas private colleges charge medical students more than Rs 5 million. This essentially lowers the cost of each medical doctor’s education by at least Rs 4 million. However the fact that one in three female doctors are still out of work wastes a lot of public dollars and compromises the quality of medical care.
The director of policy research at PRIDE, Dr. Shahid Naeem, notes that one in five medical graduates opts not to enter the workforce. These graduates had a high proportion of married people, which suggests a pattern where people pursue medical education to increase their chances of getting married. To ensure value for money, Dr. Naeem advises that the government reconsider its approach to distributing seats among medical colleges in the public sector.
The survey’s results also shed light on Pakistan’s “doctor brides” problem, where families prefer their daughters to seek medical degrees in order to find appropriate husbands.
