A Case Study of Pakistan Determinants of Female Labour Force in South Asia 99& 2001-02) to analyze the income gap using the Mincerian Earnings Function approach to investigate the returns to education. Their study led to three noteworthy findings. First, gender does play a significant role in explaining the wage gap as being a male increases income by 169.9% than being a woman. Second, returns to education increase with additional years of education for both men and women, but the effect is stronger for the latter. Third, a large percentage of women are engaged in unpaid family work, however, education plays a significant role in helping them choose better earning occupations and work as employers or self-employed. For instance, this, in essence, reduces the occupational segregation between gender. Their results are consistent with the findings of other authors(Altas & Bourguignon, 2005; Fields& Soares, 2002). Hence, both the factors above highlight how education plays a role in reducing the gender pay gap and occupational segregation. 4.3.4. Purdah Pakistan is a Muslim majority country with 96.28% of Muslims(Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, n.d.), and the religious implications of(purdah/ veil) confine women to limited work opportunities that are often sexually segregated such as schoolteachers, midwives, domestic cleaners, etc.(Ejaz, 2011b). However, the severity of purdah also depends on the location, as in rural areas, it´s stricter. Its level also varies as burqa is full covering from head to toe, chadar or a dupatta just a coverage on the head, with each lower level of purdah 2 associated with increased degrees of freedom. In one of the first studies that analyzed the relationship between norms of wearing a veil and working in Pakistan, Shaheed& Mumtaz(1983) found out that for HBWs, it was the central reason to work from their homes. Although purdah has to do with the society’s conservatism,“but it ultimately manifests itself in the ability to control female labour and ability to control female access to resources through the practice of seclusion”(Akram-Lodhi, 2010, p. 93). The above factor might help explain the surge of women working in the informal context and that too as HBWs. Hence, women are“kept” segregated in the house separate from the other men, which is essentially ensuring that the political economy of the household is intact. To conclude, the situation of countries like Pakistan that are muddied with a patriarchal society dictating 2. Only in terms of layering of cloth 22