A Case Study of Pakistan Determinants of Female Labour Force in South Asia and Empowerment of Women in 2002. The objective of this policy was to empower women socially, economically and politically(A. Choudhry& Mutalib, 2019). Despite all such efforts, the country’s performance in social indicators is amongst the worst in the world(Easterly, 2001). Aside from the severe marginalization of women in education and health, women’s economic opportunity remains constrained in Pakistan(Siegmann& Majid, 2014). Though the rate of women participating in the labour market has increased since the last decade but in which sector has the numbers gone up? Though access to paid employment remains a relevant issue, the quality of jobs also matters. This was highlighted by Kabeer(2016) and in another study‘ Women have made clear gains in terms of the quantity of employment generated by neoliberal patterns of growth, but their gains are far less clear in relation to its quality ’(Seguino, 2016, p. 16). Women in most cases are involved in the“survival jobs” jobs that force these women out of pure economic needs to support their families rather than jobs that“develop a sense of self-worth and dignity’(Chun, 2016, p. 176). Such a scenario is described as an“added worker effect”. It implies that secondary workers most often women, are engaged in economic activities during recessions to balance the loss of earnings of other household members as a result of external shocks in the economy. A. Khan(2007) describes a similar situation for Pakistani women who work mainly out of dire economic needs. An illustration of their distressed employment is their poorer share of employment in the formal sector and higher concentration in the informal sector. LFP in the formal sector stands at 25%, which is the lowest in the region except for Afghanistan. Women’s informal employment as a percentage of non-agricultural employment is as high as 92.1% in 2018(International Labour Organization, 2018b, p. 118). The latter is especially worrisome as the informal sector sees little regulation, employees are hired without any formal contracts(mostly verbally), are subjected to sexual harassment, verbal abuse and work is often not just insecure but can even be hazardous. Even the labour unions are male-oriented and provide little to no support to such workers(Sarwar& Abbasi, 2013). Of those women working in the informal sector, 80% of them work as Home-Based Workers(HBWs) in Pakistan compared to only 4% males. Their activities include, for instance, handicrafts, post-manufacturing tasks such as carpet weaving, embroidery, packing etc. The number of HBWs increased to 4.37 million in 2017-18(when the latest labour force survey was conducted) 17