We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown on a sample of women who completed their undergraduate degrees from public colleges in Lahore, Pakistan. We conducted
phone surveys with 1,617 women from May to June 2020 collecting information on their own and household outcomes. Pakistan imposed a strict lockdown in March 2020, following the first recorded death in the country in the same month. We survey the respondents, on average, 10 weeks after the lockdown was first implemented, when it was beginning to be eased. The country was implementing a policy of ‘smart lockdown’, imposing stricter safety and social distancing protocols in localized areas that were deemed to have high or rising infection rates. We interviewed women belonging to urban, middle class households in Lahore. Our sample is unique in that they are highly educated – all of the women in our sample are recent college graduates – when only about 10% of the women in urban areas of Pakistan have an undergraduate or higher degree (PSLM, 2015).
