Creating an Oral History Archive of Government Work: The Women in Public Service in Pakistan Project

The Women in Public Service in Pakistan (WPSP) oral history project records the professional life histories of women employed in public sector institutions. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we discuss the nature of public sector employment (sarkari nokri) and review the data and literature on women’s participation in public sector work in Pakistan. These sources reveal that the trajectory of women’s employment in the public sector has been shaped by “gender mainstreaming,” which, in turn, is driven by global treaties and goals. Then, after describing the project design, we explore our narrators’ assertions of status, ability, and achievements as they navigate patriarchy. We argue that women public sector employees have collectively forged a social identity and modified the terms of patriarchy as it applies to them. This article presents women’s public sector employment as a coherent subject of study across a range of sectors of work from education to the civil service. This article also demonstrates that oral history methods enable a substantial intervention in the study of government employment in Pakistan. As such, this rich archive of women’s experiences serves public, scholarly, and institutional interests; is comparable to oral history projects on government in other parts of the world; and intervenes in ongoing debates about digital oral history. At the same time, the WPSP oral history project is unique in its use of an oral history method to study government employment in Pakistan. Our methods, approaches, and conclusions are instructive both for scholars of near-contemporary history in Pakistan and for oral historians seeking to establish their own projects on women in public life.