WE have a problem. A very complex problem. Half of our population does not participate in the economy, and henceforth are severely discriminated against. The women of Pakistan are missing.

To mitigate, and perhaps one day eliminate the wanton discrimination against women, the natural first step is to understand the genesis of discriminatory attitudes towards women. In this article, I will provide you with an explanation why there is great variation in attitudes towards the appropriate role of women in different societies.

According to the World Values Survey, described as a “global research project that explores people’s values and beliefs”, 79pc of Pakistan opines that men are more entitled to have a job than women.

A similar picture emerges when we look at more objective measures of female discrimination. For example, Pakistan has one of the lowest female labour force participation, firm ownership and literacy in the world.

For far too long we have been ignorant and misdiagnosing the whole problem of discrimination against women in Pakistan. The hitherto ‘solution’ proposed by our government is the vague promise of greater education for women.

On the other hand, the ‘cultural critics’ point towards some cut-off year that launched the Pakistani society into a cultural regress.

These explanations, or more appropriately speculations, probably do play a role but these are, nonetheless, simplistic explanations to the ubiquitous and complex problem of discrimination against women, which of course is not idiosyncratic to Pakistan. There are larger natural forces at work. Let us understand them.

In 1970 Ester Boserup put forward a radical explanation on the origins of gender discrimination. She hypothesised that differences in gender roles in different societies have their origins in the form of farming traditionally practised in the pre-industrial period. She identified important differences in “shifting and plough cultivation” practices.

Shifting cultivation is labour intensive and requires hand-held tools such as a hoe and digging stick. On the contrary, plough agriculture is capital intensive using the plough to prepare the soil.

Unlike the hoe or digging stick, operating the plough requires significant upper body strength, grip strength and “bursts of power” which are needed either to manipulate the plough or control the animal that pulls it.

Hence, Boserup postulated that when plough agriculture is practised, men have an advantage in farming relative to women. She theorised that the belief that the home (read chaar-diwari) is the “natural” place for women evolved from the type of farming practice in place. And even when societies move out of agriculture, these beliefs, internalised by society, persist.

In a recent paper published in May 2013, Alberto Alesina and colleagues at Harvard University effectively vindicated this long-held Boserup hypothesis. Using data from 177 countries, they found overwhelming evidence in favour of Boserup’s hypothesis.

They documented that countries that employed the plough displayed greater misogynistic tendencies and lower female firm ownership, labour force and political participation, relative to the countries that were pursuing shifting cultivation. They found identical evidence at district, ethnicity and individual level.

Moreover, as the type of agricultural practice pursued was heavily dependent on the climate and location, it could not be possible for more discriminatory societies to “adopt” plough use.

Hence, the direction of causality was immutably from plough use to discrimination. They tested their conclusions against a whole battery of sensitivity analysis but the large effect of plough use on gender roles and attitudes remains.

In an earlier article, I had argued for the institutional roots of poverty. It is of course possible that historical plough use promoted institutions, policies and markets that are less conducive to participation of women outside the domestic sphere. To address this concern, Alesina and colleagues employ an ingenious technique. They employ data of immigrants born and raised in the US and Europe. They exploit the fact that cultural norms and attitudes unlike institutions are internal to the individual ie when individuals move, their cultural values largely stay with them, while their external environment is left behind.

Utilising a large data set of immigrants born and raised in US and Europe, they document that if the women’s parents are from a “traditional plough use” country, their participation in the labour force is much lower and they display the same less equal gender norms and attitudes relative to societies that practised shifting agriculture.

Of course, there are other forces influencing female discrimination: the discrimination at the workplace, discrimination within the family, and the subtle effect of women marrying older and henceforth higher-income spouses that provides an intrinsic incentive for women to work less or not at all, to maximise family income.

All these effects are carefully and painstakingly taken into account by Alesina and his colleagues but the conclusion that plough use accounts for 35-50pc of all variation in discriminatory attitudes and objective measures of female discrimination remains unchanged.

Ergo, cultural historicism plays a large role in the varied discriminatory attitudes towards women across countries, ethnicities and individuals.

Pakistan needs more intense introspection at a societal level to reform our attitudes towards the appropriate role of women in society. This of course is not enough. The government needs to step in to dislodge our long engrained “plough mentality”.

Given the magnitude of these cultural effects, there is a need for deliberation on laws that provide special incentives and subsidies to parents to send their female children to school and then out into the labour force.

The view that women belong at home is perpetuated from generation to generation and has its origins in plough cultivation that led men to work in the field and women to stay at home. Hence, there is nothing “natural” about women working in the home. It is mere historicism, an accident that needs to be undone.

The writer is an advisor to the Dutch government on macroeconomic policy.

Twitter: @mrsultan713