The salaries of women working in the civil service who have been ordered by the Taliban to stay at home have been sharply cut, the Afghan Finance Ministry announced on Monday.
After returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban forced female civil servants to stay at home, while continuing to pay them a salary even if they were no longer working.
“The salary of women who do not go to the office will increase to 5,000 Afghanis per month” (about 95 Canadian dollars), Ahmad Wali Haqmal, spokesman for the Ministry of Finance, announced to AFP. This measure is effective from this month of July, he specified.
Women who have been able to continue working in sectors such as health or some schools are receiving unchanged salaries.
Administrative jobs in ministries could be paid around 20,000 afghanis per month, but many had been reduced to 15,000 afghanis by the Taliban government.
But women could earn an average of 35,000 afghanis per month, like female teachers in higher education, who were driven out of universities.
A 25-year-old Afghan woman who worked for the Ministry of Information and Culture told AFP on condition of anonymity that her salary would be cut in half since she had previously earned 10,000 afghanis per month.
“Making us women stay at home is already a big problem, we are in a bad psychological state. Now that our salaries are going to drop, it will be even worse.”
His salary allowed him to support a family of seven, including his sick mother. Now he will only be able to support the family for two weeks, she said.
The wage cuts will affect tens of thousands of women working in the public sector in Afghanistan, some of them heads of households.
Since the establishment of the Islamic Emirate in August 2021, the Taliban have taken numerous repressive measures against women by invoking Islamic law, a policy decried as “gender apartheid” by the UN.
Afghan women have been banned from secondary and university education, parks, museums, public baths, gyms and beauty salons.