Suleman Dawood School of Business (SDSB) is organising a PhD Management Dissertation Defence, “Exploring Women Engineers' Experiences in Pakistani Engineering Industry” by Zainab Amir, Candidate PhD Management.
May 13, 2026
Time:
2 pm
Dissertation Defence Committee
Dr Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar- Supervisor & Chair
Dr Muhammad Azfar Nisar– Member SDSB
Dr Misbah Tanveer Chaudhry – Member SDSB
Dr Maryam Mustafa ‐ Member (LUMS)
Dr Maria Akram- External Examiner (UET)
Abstract
This dissertation explores the experiences of women engineers in Pakistan, focusing on how organisational, cultural, and infrastructural systems shape professional life and reproduce gender inequality. It asks how gendered norms and worker ideals influence women’s experiences, how women navigate and resist these constraints, and how their participation is made possible in workplaces that fail to recognise care as an ethical responsibility. The study draws on thirty-nine interviews with practising engineers, a key informant interview with Pakistan’s first woman engineering professor, two participant observations, and reflexive notes to develop a nuanced understanding of these dynamics.
The analysis shows that engineering workplaces valorise long hours, site-based work, and physical endurance while purdah norms reinforce spatial and symbolic exclusion. Women are often confined to administrative or office-based roles, and men are granted flexibility and authority when they deviate from hypermasculine ideals, a phenomenon conceptualised as gendered elasticity of hypermasculinity. These findings expand Global South perspectives on organisational inequality and challenge assumptions drawn from Western contexts.
The study also demonstrates how women engineers’ professional legitimacy is contingent on infrastructural neglect, bureaucratic inertia, and the valorisation of productivity and availability metrics. Women negotiate these challenges through strategies of accommodation, overperformance, and subtle defiance, which both sustain and unsettle organisational and neocolonial capitalist structures. The study develops the notion of infrastructural recognizability, showing how women’s bodies and labour are unanticipated within organisational architectures and introduces the concept of the spiral of recuperation, demonstrating how acts of compliance and resistance recursively interact, as institutions absorb dissent and women recalibrate their strategies. These insights reveal how colonial and capitalist legacies are materially encoded in workplaces, while women’s negotiations generate both performative disruptions and aspirations for more equitable professional futures.
Finally, the dissertation conceptualises kumba (i.e., extended family networks of mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and spouses) as a love-infused, relational infrastructure that sustains women’s careers. These arrangements enable women to meet organisational expectations structured around disembodied, unencumbered worker ideals without transforming those expectations. By foregrounding kumba, the study critiques individualist approaches to work-life balance and demonstrates how relational care quietly subsidises organisational functioning.
The findings offer practical implications for educational institutes, governments, managers, organisational leaders and women engineers, emphasising structural accountability, relational recognition, and collective strategies to address systemic inequities. Overall, this dissertation provides a culturally grounded, theoretically informed account of how gendered norms, organisational structures, and relational infrastructures shape women engineers’ professional lives in Pakistan.
