Dr Shabana Safdar Khan
There is a truth so obvious it should need no argument: when women shape a society, that society advances. History offers no credible counterexample. Nations that have unlocked the potential of their women have grown faster, governed better, and suffered less. Yet the distance between this truth and the lived reality of millions of Pakistani women remains one of the most consequential failures of our national life. International Women’s Day arrives each year as both a moment of acknowledgment and a quiet indictment. It asks us to celebrate what has been achieved while forcing us to confront what has not.
Pakistan has, to its credit, moved in the right direction on paper. Legislation addressing harassment in the workplace has been placed on the books. Efforts to raise the minimum legal age of marriage have been pursued with varying degrees of political will. Legal frameworks against domestic violence have been constructed. These are not nothing. They represent the accumulated effort of activists who spent years in courtrooms, conference rooms, and street protests demanding that the state recognize what it owed its female citizens. The laws that emerged from that struggle carry real weight. But weight on paper and weight in practice are entirely different things.
The numbers do not permit comfortable conclusions. According to data compiled by the Sustainable Social Development Organisation, more than 32,500 cases of gender-based violence were formally reported in Pakistan in 2024 alone. Over 5,000 of those were rape cases. Nearly 24,000 involved abduction. More than 2,000 were cases of domestic violence. And approximately 550 women lost their lives in so-called honour killings, a phrase that disguises murder behind the language of tradition. These figures represent only what was reported. The actual scale of violence endured in silence, in homes sealed shut by shame and fear, is beyond any dataset’s reach.
What makes these figures truly damning is not their size but what follows from them. The conviction rate for rape in Pakistan stands at just 0.5 percent. For honour killing, it is the same. For abduction, it falls to 0.1 percent. For domestic violence, it reaches a modest 1.3 percent. In practice, this means that a woman who survives violence and summons the courage to report it has almost no realistic prospect of seeing her attacker face justice. Weak investigations, absent forensic evidence, an overburdened and often indifferent judiciary, and the crushing weight of social stigma combine to ensure that impunity is not the exception but the rule. Laws without enforcement are not protections. They are performances.
The economic picture is equally troubling. Pakistan’s female labour force participation rate for the 15 to 64 age group sits at 22.6 percent. The global average is 52.6 percent. Even within South Asia, a region not exactly celebrated for gender parity, Pakistan trails the average of 25.2 percent. This is not a gap. It is a chasm. And it carries a direct cost that ought to compel attention from those for whom moral arguments alone prove insufficient. The World Bank has calculated that a ten percent increase in women’s labour force participation could add 1.5 percent to Pakistan’s GDP growth annually. In a country that perennially struggles to generate enough economic activity to match its population’s needs, that figure should be transformative. Yet the opportunity is surrendered, year after year, to convention.
Other countries have demonstrated what becomes possible when this calculation is made honestly. Bangladesh made a deliberate policy decision to expand women-intensive manufacturing industries. The result was not merely economic growth but a measurable reduction in poverty that lifted millions of families. Saudi Arabia, a society with cultural contexts in some ways comparable to Pakistan’s, made the decision to ease restrictions on women’s employment and mobility. The economic activity that was subsequently unlocked amounted to billions of dollars. These are not distant utopias. They are recent examples from countries that faced similar pressures and chose differently.
In Pakistan, the barriers are well understood if rarely confronted with the seriousness they deserve. Mobility remains a persistent obstacle. Safe and affordable public transport is inadequate in most cities and effectively nonexistent in rural areas. Workplace harassment continues despite legislation, because legislation without institutional enforcement mechanisms is aspirational at best. Social expectations that confine women to domestic roles are reproduced across generations, not because they reflect some immutable truth about what women are capable of, but because structures of education, employment, and public life have not been sufficiently redesigned to accommodate women’s full participation. Even women who complete higher education frequently exit the workforce within a few years of marriage, not by genuine choice, but because the conditions necessary for sustained participation do not exist.
Government action is necessary but not sufficient. Meaningful change requires leadership from every institution that holds cultural influence: religious institutions, media organizations, political parties, professional associations, and the informal networks through which social norms are reinforced or challenged. Those who command public attention have an obligation that goes beyond advocacy. They must also challenge the language that demeans women, the rhetoric that frames female ambition as transgression and female assertion as provocation. Hostile language, left unchallenged, does not remain merely symbolic. It sets the ceiling on what the next generation of girls believes is possible for them.
Pakistan cannot afford to lose half its nation to exclusion. It cannot afford the economic waste of unused talent, the social cost of unaddressed violence, or the moral diminishment that comes from a society that protects its weakest members so poorly. Laws must be enforced, not filed. Institutions must be reformed, not merely created. Culture must be challenged, not excused. The work is difficult, sustained, and unglamorous. But no serious claim to national progress can be made while millions of women remain outside the boundaries of full participation. The promise of equality is not a gift to be granted. It is a debt long overdue.
