By Zahra Fatima
There is perhaps no shortage of slogans in Pakistan. Gender equality is among the most fashionable of them. We speak of empowering women. We celebrate girls who top examinations, women who enter parliament, female entrepreneurs who build businesses and professionals who rise to senior positions. Every March, the vocabulary becomes louder: empowerment, inclusion, equality, opportunity. Then the banners come down. For millions of Pakistani women, little changes.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore. Pakistan has educated a growing generation of women, yet has struggled to create an economy and society capable of absorbing their potential. The country has laws promising equality, institutions tasked with protecting women’s rights and policies devoted to empowerment. Yet the distance between what is written on paper and what women experience in their daily lives remains considerable.
The numbers tell a sobering story. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, Pakistan ranked 148th — last among 148 countries. Its overall gender-parity score was 56.7 per cent. More revealing was its ranking of 147th in economic participation and opportunity. The figures should not merely embarrass policymakers. They should force a more fundamental question: why does a country that increasingly educates its women still fail to fully utilise them?
Education is not enough for years, education has been presented as the answer to women’s inequality. Educate a girl, we are told, and you empower a woman. There is truth in this. Education expands choices, improves health outcomes and strengthens a woman’s ability to participate in society. But education by itself cannot dismantle the barriers that appear after graduation. Pakistan’s female labour-force participation remains only 24 per cent, compared with 80.1pc for men, according to World Bank data for 2025. This creates one of Pakistan’s most painful paradoxes. A young woman can spend years studying, earn a university degree and acquire professional skills — only to find that employment is suddenly considered optional. For some, the obstacle is inadequate transport. For others, unsafe workplaces or harassment. For many, it is the expectation that marriage should mark the end of professional ambition. The problem, therefore, is not simply that women lack opportunities. It is that society often decides which opportunities they are permitted to pursue. The second shift nobody counts There is another form of inequality that rarely appears in economic statistics. A woman finishes her office shift and returns home to begin another.
She prepares dinner. She looks after children. She assists elderly parents. She manages the household. She remembers school meetings, medical appointments, groceries and family obligations. None of these tasks appears on her salary slip.
The World Bank notes that women are significantly less likely than men to participate in the labour market and, when they do, are more likely to be concentrated in informal, vulnerable and lower-paying work. It also identifies unpaid domestic and care work as an important factor shaping women’s economic participation.
This is the invisible economy upon which visible economies depend. A woman who stays home to care for children is frequently described as economically inactive. But if that care work disappeared tomorrow, how many households would be able to function? The question exposes a fundamental flaw in how society defines productivity. We count paid labour because it generates a wage. We ignore unpaid labour because it generates no payslip. Yet both sustain society. The glass ceiling begins much earlier
Gender inequality is also frequently discussed as though it begins in the boardroom. It does not. It begins much earlier — in classrooms, homes and expectations. A boy may be encouraged to be ambitious, independent and financially successful. A girl may be encouraged to be successful too, but with conditions attached. Be educated, but remain “respectable”. Have a career, but do not let it interfere with family. Be ambitious, but not intimidating. Earn, but remember that the household remains your primary responsibility. Speak, but not too loudly.
The contradictions eventually follow women into the workplace. The World Economic Forum’s data places Pakistan among the world’s weakest performers in economic gender parity. The country’s economic-participation score was only 34.7pc in 2025. This is not merely a women’s problem. It is an economic problem. Every qualified woman prevented from entering or remaining in the workforce represents skills that the economy has paid to develop but failed to use. Equality is not a war against men. Perhaps the most counterproductive misunderstanding surrounding gender equality is the idea that women’s advancement necessarily means men’s decline. It does not.
Equality does not mean replacing one hierarchy with another. It means removing gender as a barrier to opportunity. A man who shares childcare is not surrendering his masculinity. A woman who earns is not abandoning her family. A father who invests in his daughter’s education is not challenging tradition. A husband who supports his wife’s career is not losing authority. And a workplace that promotes women on merit is not doing women a favour. It is simply recognising talent. This distinction matters because gender equality cannot be achieved by women alone.
Men are fathers, husbands, brothers, colleagues, employers, teachers and policymakers. Their attitudes determine whether many women can translate rights into reality. The safety question There is also little point in telling women to participate more fully in public life if society does not make that participation safe. A woman considering employment may have to think about transport, working hours, harassment, family concerns and workplace security before she even considers salary.
Digital spaces have added another layer. Pakistan’s expanding digital economy offers women opportunities to work, learn and build businesses from home. But online harassment and abuse can also push women out of public conversation. The result is a peculiar form of exclusion: women may technically have access to a platform but still feel unable to use it freely. Access is not the same as participation. And participation is not the same as power. From representation to decision-making. Pakistan has women in parliament, universities, media, courts, hospitals and businesses. That progress should not be dismissed. But representation alone cannot be the final measure of equality. The real question is: who makes decisions?
How many women control financial resources? How many occupy senior management positions?
How many have meaningful influence over policy? How many can make decisions about their education, employment, marriage and finances without coercion? These are more difficult questions because they take the discussion beyond visibility. A woman in a room is representation. A woman who has an equal voice in deciding what happens in that room is power. Pakistan needs more of the latter. The economic argument is unavoidable Gender equality is often presented as a moral issue. It is one. But it is also an economic necessity. Pakistan faces low productivity, unemployment, weak human-capital development and persistent fiscal pressures. It can ill afford to leave a large portion of its population on the margins of economic activity. Only 24pc of Pakistani women are in the labour force compared with more than 80pc of men. The message is straightforward. Pakistan does not simply need more jobs. It needs to ensure that women can access, retain and advance in those jobs. That requires more than awareness campaigns. It requires structural reform. What must change: from rhetoric to reform
If gender equality is to move beyond slogan, it must be embedded in policy, not sentiment. First, labour law enforcement must be strengthened. Anti-harassment legislation exists, but implementation remains weak. Dedicated workplace compliance units, faster complaint mechanisms and penalties for non-compliance are essential if women are to feel safe entering and staying in the workforce.
Second, childcare must be treated as economic infrastructure, not private burden. Public or subsidised childcare facilities in urban centres and industrial zones would directly increase female labour-force participation, particularly among young mothers. Third, transport safety and accessibility must be prioritised. Women’s mobility is a precondition for economic participation. Expanding safe public transport routes, regulated ride-hailing protections and women-only transit options in high-risk corridors are not social luxuries but economic enablers. Fourth, financial inclusion must be expanded aggressively. Easier access to credit for women entrepreneurs, simplified account opening procedures and targeted SME financing can shift women from informal to formal economic activity.
Fifth, education policy must connect to employment outcomes. Universities and technical institutes should be linked with industry through structured internships, placement programmes and career pipelines specifically designed to prevent the post-graduation drop-out of women.
Finally, data must be disaggregated and publicly tracked. Without gender-disaggregated labour, wage and leadership data, inequality remains invisible in policymaking. What is not measured is rarely fixed. These are not radical demands. They are basic institutional adjustments required for a modern economy. A sharper conclusion: equality as economic design. The debate on gender equality in Pakistan often remains trapped in abstraction — rights, empowerment, awareness. But the real issue is structural design.
Pakistan has already invested in educating women. It has already produced a large pool of skilled, capable and ambitious female graduates. The failure is not in human capital. It is in institutional architecture. An economy that restricts mobility, ignores unpaid labour, tolerates workplace insecurity and fails to provide childcare will always underperform — regardless of how many women it educates. Gender equality, therefore, is not a parallel social agenda. It is an economic reform agenda. It requires redesigning labour markets, public services, workplace regulation and financial systems so that women are not merely present in the economy, but fully integrated into it. Until that happens, Pakistan will continue to celebrate women in speeches while underutilizing them in practice. And that is not just a gender gap. It is an economic loss the country can no longer afford
