A nation’s decision to change itself within is an act of a certain determination. In the last few decades, Pakistan has gone through an unnoticeable but not unimpressible evolution in its approach towards educating, protecting, representing and economically including its women. There has been more than a twenty percentage point rise in female literacy. The number of women now being given direct financial assistance by the state is more than ten million. Women have guaranteed seats in Parliament of 60. Today, there are specialised courts to provide justice for gender-based violence survivors that weren’t established a generation ago. These are not the targets that people wish to achieve. They are facts that are current. But the international discourse on Pakistani women’s development often ignores these advances virtually entirely, going back to the deficit story, however well-meaning, unbalanced and incomplete that may be. That full history is no excuse for complacency. It’s a request for precision.
Start with education as it is the place where the most basic change has taken place. In the early 2000s, about 32 percent of Pakistani women were literate. This is currently about 54 per cent. That’s no minor improvement. Over a 20-year period, that’s more than a quarter of a century’s worth of gains for tens of millions of women and girls, who can read, write, access information and engage in economic and civic life in ways their mothers were not able to. Overall, Pakistan’s literacy rate is still not up to the mark, and the urban-rural and provincial disparities, especially the persistent disadvantage of women in Balochistan and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are serious concerns. But the direction of travel is clearly one way and change is significant. If a country is able to raise female literacy from 32 to 54 percent, it’s not a country sitting on the sidelines of women’s education.
The economic situation is more complex and more positive, but one that is often forgotten. Women’s labour force participation (LFPR) rate in Pakistan has been reported as 24.4 percent, which is lower than the regional and global averages but higher than the 2010 figure, and is increasing. More importantly, the type of women’s economic engagement is becoming more diverse. There are women in judiciary, military aviation, media, entrepreneurial world and public administration, which were not so common 10 years ago. It is not a token appearance. These are the aspects of structural change, where sectors and institutions are deemed suitable for women’s participation in society in Pakistan. It doesn’t occur in a vacuum and it doesn’t happen in one fell swoop. There are three in Pakistan.
Of particular interest is the Benazir Income Support Programme, one of the largest direct initiatives of gender security for women in South Asia. Today over 10 million women are on the government’s financial rolls under BISP and BISP is one of the largest women-centred social protection programmes in the continent. The programme is specifically designed to target support through women and not male household heads, based on research findings that women are more likely than male household heads to invest in children’s health, education, and household nutrition. In scale, this implies that BISP is not only a poverty alleviation programme. It is a tool for women’s economic engagement, giving millions of women a financial relationship with the State, without going through the “usual channels”. The political-economic undertones are important; 10 million women who have BISP cards are women who have a tangible, material interest in sustaining programmes for their benefit.
There is progress although implementation is uneven on legal protection. Twenty years ago, there was no formal workplace harassment law in Pakistan and no formal complaints mechanism or remedies. Twenty years ago, there was no formal workplace harassment law in Pakistan, no formal complaints mechanism or no remedies. Although the laws on domestic violence vary in scope and enforcement throughout the provinces, they represent a step in legislation towards recognizing domestic violence as a public issue and in the need for it to be addressed by state intervention instead of being a private matter of the family. Perhaps most significantly from the structural perspective, there are Gender Based Violence courts set up that have been established to facilitate access to justice for women in a way that has been structurally different from what has previously been available; these have been created in an effort to minimise the delays and barriers to accessing justice faced by the vast majority of women who are victims of Gender Based Violence. It is an institutional maturity, beyond symbolic legislation, that can be seen in courts set up specifically for the needs of GBV survivors.
The other aspect in which the record of Pakistan stands in contrast to the mainstream narrative is the parliamentary representation. The 60 seats reserved for women in the National Assembly as per the Legal Framework Order 2002 and continued as per the subsequent constitutional changes ensure a minimum level of female representation in the National Assembly, a level that many countries, even those much richer than Pakistan, do not have. Women are provincial chief ministers, senior federal ministers, judges on superior courts and more. Unlike most western democracies, Pakistan has already elected two female heads of governments (Benazir Bhutto) before. But none of this does away with the fact that women remain under-represented in formal political power, and it makes it a little more difficult to depict Pakistani women as being completely missing from public and political life.
The fairest account of this article should include what it is not arguing. The improvement of the metrics does not imply that the conditions are OK. There’s still a problem with women being unable to read and write: A female literacy rate of 54 per cent, which leaves 46 per cent of Pakistani women without the ability to read. Labour force participation at 24.4 per cent is a huge waste of human capital and individual potential as it means that three-quarters of the women in Pakistan are not working in the formal sector. Women in districts where police, court and community institutions lack sensitivity to change will feel only a partial sense of security from laws that are on paper, but not consistently implemented. There is a real gap between the legislation and what happens in practice and this must be narrowed through persistent institutional pressures, resources and political will.
However, when Pakistan’s women rights issues are talked about only in terms of where it lacks in the ideal, there is one point that is missing from the debate: Progress is not some abstract concept. It’s a literacy rate of 32 per cent, which is now 54 per cent. It is 10 million women who have a direct monetary relation with government. It is the GBV courts that didn’t exist a generation ago. It’s the girls in classrooms, the women in cockpits, the lawyers before superior courts, the entrepreneurs in the cities, small towns, all over the country.
Pakistan’s women don’t await for their salvation through international recognition. They already are in motion. Whether the story told about them will be sincere, and truthful, with them.
