Gender discrimination in Pakistan

When we talk about gender discrimination in Pakistan, we mainly focus the disparity in country’s
male and female population. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2015 by the Geneva-
based World Economic Forum, Pakistan ranked 144 out of 145 countries, second to last, in
terms of global gender equality. This is the third year on the trot that Pakistan has maintained
the penultimate ranking. The only country where women face equality issues worse than
Pakistan is Yemen.

Women make up nearly half of total population (48.8 percent) which clearly means that they are
the real asset and strength of the country. Undoubtedly, Pakistan’s sustainable socio-economic,
political and cultural development wholly lies in the equality, empowerment, participation and
representation of women in all walks of life. Despite that the status of women is below par. More
often than not, women encounter multidimensional problems such as honour killing, acid
throwing, harassment, sexual assaults, domestic violence and so on. In addition, they witness
greater inequality in access to health and education. Equal economic opportunities, political
inclusion and decision-making participation are merely a day dream for large chunk of women in
Pakistan.

When we talk about the education system, it reflects the inequality found outside the classroom.
Girls the world over are less likely than their brothers to be attending primary school. In some
cases, where a decision has to be made about which children to send to school, it is commonly
seen that parents decide to invest in their sons’ education rather than their daughters’. This may
reflect the fact that upon marriage, daughters may no longer contribute to family income and are
therefore not seen as worth investing in.
There are several gender discrimination related consequences of child labour as well. Most
obvious are the problems faced by girls who have been sexually exploited. Also girls working as
child domestic workers are often denied medical treatment when required since they are
domestic help and do not share the same status as the other children in the household. Children
who suffer an accident at work may also feel that this is their own fault for being clumsy or bad
at their job, and the adults and medical personnel who they encounter may have the same
attitude.
Education is the tool that can help break the pattern of gender discrimination and bring lasting
changes for women in developing countries like ours. Pakistan has for decades grossly
underinvested in education, and in particular, girls’ education. Girls’ education also means
comprehensive change for a society. Educated women are essential to ending gender bias,
starting by reducing the poverty that makes discrimination even worse in the developing world.
Gender inequality is a deep-rooted menace in Pakistan that is potentially hampering its socio-
economic advancement and progress. Men are the masters of women’s destiny in the country
where women are denied all decision-making powers. Cultural norms and a patriarchal mind-set
are the primary factors that are derailing women from coming out of four walls to play their part.
That’s why women are always behind bars and unable to stand shoulder by shoulder with men.
Women who live in poor households – battle grave economic obstacles ranging from poor
infrastructure to inadequate transportation facilities, financial constraints to inadequate nutrition
and extreme water shortages to poor sanitation.\
Furthermore, women financial empowerment is also crucial for closing the gender gap.
Equitable financial access will not only foster women’s bargaining power within the household
but will also help improve their health, education, nutrition and food security status. In addition,
state should strive to eliminate all forms of discrimination and violence against women. Most
importantly, the government should work round the clock to empower women through education
so that they can be active economic actors in the realm of socio-political development of
Pakistan.

Advocating for gender equality: a key to Pakistan’s development

UNFPA believes that gender equality will be achieved only when women and men enjoy
the same opportunities, rights and obligations in all spheres of life. This means sharing
equally in the distribution of power and influence and having equal opportunities for
financial independence, education and realizing their personal ambitions. UNFPA
strongly believes in the wide breadth of a woman’s potential and her capacity to make
her own informed choices about her sexual and reproductive health and her
empowerment over the course of her life.

Gender equality is a crosscutting theme that runs through all of UNFPA’s programmes.
Gaining equal value in society, from the home to the workplace, and having equal
representation and protection of women’s needs and rights in policies and law are all
components necessary for gender equality.

Report indicates it will take centuries to achieve gender parity in workplaces

around the globe
Pakistan made some good progress this year in wage equality as well as on the educational attainment sub-
index. However, this progress was insufficiently rapid to avoid the country being overtaken by a number of
faster-improving countries at the lower end of the index’s global rankings, the report added.

After years of advances in education, health, and political representation, women registered setbacks in all
three areas this year, the WEF said. Only in the area of economic opportunity did the gender gap narrow
somewhat, although there was not much to celebrate, with the global wage gap narrowing to nearly 51pc, it
added. To date, said the WEF, there was still a 32pc average gender gap that remained to be closed.

It highlighted that factors such as stagnation in the proportion of women in the workplace and women’s
declining representation in politics, coupled with greater inequality in access to health and education, offset
improvements in wage equality and the number of women in professional positions, left the global gender gap
only slightly reduced in 2018.

The report showed that there were now proportionately fewer women than men participating in the workforce,
suggesting that automation was having a disproportionate impact on jobs traditionally performed by women.

Women, WEF observed, were significantly under-represented in growing areas of employment that require
science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills. It decried the particularly low participation of women
within the artificial intelligence field, where they made up just 22pc of the workforce.

Projecting current trends into the future, it added that the overall global gender gap would close in 108 years
across the 106 countries covered since the first edition of the report. It said that the most challenging gender
gaps to close were the economic and political empowerment dimensions, which would take 202 and 107 years
to close, respectively.
Across the 149 countries assessed by the report, there were just 17 that currently had women as heads of state,
while on average just 18pc of ministers and 24pc of parliamentarians globally were women.

Similarly, women held just 34pc of managerial positions across the countries where data was available, and less
than 7pc in the in the four worst-performing countries — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Pakistan.

With an average remaining gender gap of 34.2pc, South Asia was the second-lowest scoring region on this
year’s Global Gender Gap Index, ahead of the Middle East and North Africa and behind Sub-Saharan Africa.

With the exception of Bangladesh and Pakistan at either end of South Asia’s regional table, gender parity
outcomes were somewhat homogeneous across the region. The difference in gender gap size between the
highest-ranked and lowest-ranked countries in the region was about 10pc for the educational attainment sub-
index and about 4pc for health and survival.

On political empowerment, one country — Bangladesh — reached a level of gender parity of more than 50pc,
while India had closed nearly 40pc of its gender gap on this sub-index. The region’s remaining countries had
yet to achieve a gender parity level of at least 20pc, the report said.

It is worth noting that, from a low base, South Asia had made the fastest progress on closing its gender gap of
any world region over the past decade. In terms of year-on-year progress, out of the seven countries from the
region covered by the index this year, four countries increased their overall scores compared to last year, while
three had decreased their overall scores.