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Women empowerment reforms

THE obvious is often obscure, it seems. The state of affairs regarding women’s rights has hardly ever
been a matter of pressing concern for our masters. Yet ornamented rhetoric has taken over grass-
root reforms, and our gradual numbing to screaming headlines of abuse and assault on the basic
dignity of women has reduced most of the work to mere table talk.

Let’s talk basics. One could argue that women’s rights are intrinsically ingrained in the Constitution
— which they are — and hence the matter is adjudicated. Meanwhile, laws to protect and empower
women passed in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan employ ferociously ambitious clauses, which might
make even the most cynical observer hopeful. Yet beneath the overarching landscape painted by
these legislative feats, there is an absence of solid foundations. Excepting Punjab, there are no
implementation mechanisms embedded in pro-women laws, while the architects of criminal justice
have designed a system to address abuses they have never had to face.

Take violence against women, for example: a woman facing abuse has to gear up for battle on
multiple fronts. The notion of her seeking support and justice outside the walls of her abode is still
frowned upon by society. Her agony doesn’t end here. The poorly-trained state apparatus she must
turn to for protection still grapples with moral dilemmas surrounding her circumstances — from her
lifestyle to clothes to domestic background, all factor into an officer’s deliberations on whether to
file a report or to send her off with a sermon about preserving the sanctity of the home by keeping
silent on ‘trivial’ issues like abuse.

Hollow chants of equal rights for all might be enough to keep patriarchal policymakers content, but
at what cost?

On the rare occasion that a case is filed, the burden to prove the abuse — without having the tools
necessary to do so — is on her. Physical abuse requires a medico-legal report, but getting to a state
medical facility in the first place is an uphill battle. Moreover, the lack of awareness among victims of
the crucial impact timely medico-legal examinations have on investigations often result in delayed
reporting, and hence critical evidence to successfully prosecute perpetrators is lost.

From reporting to evidence collection to the trial itself, the system disenfranchises the victim every
step of the way. The survivor service model of the Violence against Women Centre in Multan
addresses this by providing each service — including police, prosecution, medico-legal facility and
rehabilitation — under one roof, by its all-women team, despite not being allocated funds and
salaries for months.

This bias against women embedded in our criminal justice system has been irrefutably gauged for
decades, but to no recourse. Selective amendments to laws, thrust upon the public when an incident
arouses national uproar, proves that women’s empowerment, instead of being crafted through
policy- based structural reform, is curated according to populist sentiment.

Herein lies another issue. Political parties often decorate their manifestos with promises of ushering
in a new era for the disenfranchised half of Pakistan’s population, yet rarely have dedicated teams
within their ranks actually working on a roadmap for implementation. And with no real watchdog to
keep a politically neutral check on elected governments’ election promises, most women
empowerment reforms never see the light of day. For the few that are legislated on, we are faced
with the eternal question that has haunted most of Pakistan’s development agendas: how will it be
implemented, and by whom?

The power to do so rests with the bureaucracy. This reality is in stark contrast to the belief that
elected officials have about their roles when they enter the mammoth legislatures, with their ability
to boost even the most meagre of egos. There is an inevitable clash between what the people’s
representatives want versus what they can get from the state machinery. It is unfair to demand
reform from a system designed to follow the beaten path and discourage even the slightest course
correction. To task already stretched departments with implementing new agendas and reforms will
inevitably result in a flawed product for the people.

Women development departments in Pakistan are no different. They are barely financed with
budgets to match their ambitions, and thus mostly relegated to planning events for International
Women’s Day. It begs the question: why has a specialised field like gender been left to career civil
servants who are often shifted from one department to another, triggering a never-ending
reinvention of the wheel? To connect with on-ground issues in real time and provide genuinely
implementable solutions, there is a dire need for a specialised cadre for women-specific
development. Though the Punjab Women Protection Authority Act, 2017, was introduced keeping
such views in mind, it has yet to be made functional.

From criminal justice to societal attitudes that hold women’s basic rights and development back, a
starting point for women empowerment reforms must be the careful review and corresponding
amendment to policies and implementation mechanisms. Hollow chants of equal rights might be
enough to keep patriarchal policymakers content, but at what cost? How much longer must we
pretend that our job is done with the collective sighs we exhale whenever a rape victim is killed
without justice, or a woman is sexually harassed at her workplace with no recourse, or a woman
simply seeking a divorce is dragged through the courts with never-ending delay tactics?

It’s time to shrug off this immaculate imitation of a just country for women and bring forth real
change — forging a nation where women are equal participants in the development process rather
than the subjects of social experiments. Federal and provincial governments alike should harness
their resources to further the groundbreaking work already in progress instead of engaging in
populist rhetoric that only serves to strengthen misogyny. The revolution is here and to stay, till the
last woman standing, and — this time — men should stand beside them.

For the women

IT was supposed to be a very big deal. In March, the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN
was supposed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the iconic Beijing Declaration. That
declaration, signed by over 100 countries including Pakistan in 1995, imagined a world where
women and girls would be able to exercise all their rights, could live lives free of violence and the
threat of violence, have the freedom to make choices about their own lives and bodies, and have
access to education and employment.

It was a tall order, then and now, but it was also another time. Such was the enthusiasm and
ebullience of the moment that changes were instituted, many countries changed discriminatory
laws, and others began to invest in areas like maternal health. The way a country treated its women
became a matter of international discussion and reputation, and rights organisations eagerly
monitored whether governments were living up to their promises, moving ahead on the path
towards gender equality.

The long awaited CSW-Beijing 25 conference would never take place. Days before the meeting was
due to convene, Covid-19 struck New York City. The gleaming UN building, where women from all
over the world were planning to gather, was like all the other gleaming buildings in the city: it had
been shut down. The city was in lockdown as the virus was not in control. The meeting, like all other
meetings, was cancelled, plans that had taken years to finesse and finalise were, like so much else in
the world, suddenly and completely abandoned.

Some would say that, even before the pandemic, the summit was dead before it ever lived.

While no one could have foreseen a global pandemic, there had been signs that did not bode well
for the meeting. Led by Algeria, more conservative countries refused to agree to the language in
portions of the joint declaration. The touchy bit had to do, expectedly, with sexual and reproductive
rights that the Algeria contingent (including many other Muslim countries) refused to include.

One of their ‘surprise’ allies was none other than the US, which in keeping with the Trump
administration’s ‘family first’ agenda did not feel like they could agree to anything that could be seen
as supportive of the right to abortion. All of it is a pity, for the large umbrella of sexual and
reproductive rights did not refer to anything in particular but rather the right of any woman (just like
any man) to have full control over her body. Regardless, there was no agreement and the joint
statement is full of the kind of watery language that suggests a lot but commits to nothing at all.
Some would say that, even before the pandemic, the summit was dead before it ever lived.

Although the meeting did not take place at the last minute, preparations (including individual
country submissions to the UN Commission on the Status of Women) had already been made.
Pakistan’s submission, the official estimation of our progress over the past 25 years, makes for
interesting reading. Reading the report, I was surprised, for instance, to learn that everything from
the ‘Shamsi Tawanai Scheme’ for solar energy pumps to the ‘Agri-Financing Scheme for Cut Flowers’
were all included under the section entitled ‘Economic Empowerment Achievements’.

Sadder was the fact that, even with the inclusion of these general programmes that have little to
nothing to do with women’s empowerment, the sum total of five years progress takes up only a
page and a half.

Towards eliminating violence against women, one of the goals of the original Beijing Declaration,
Pakistan established the National Institute of Human Rights, which despite a nearly Rs60 million
budget allocated in 2016 has nevertheless not produced any particular measures towards actually
realising this goal. Most Pakistanis, particularly Pakistani women, would also be surprised to discover
that an endowment fund of Rs100m was allocated for ‘Free Legal Aid for Poor Victims’ of rights
violations, which was to be disbursed through district and sessions judges (and yet no report exists
of these disbursements).

Then there was the Rs2.7 billion proposed for “women empowerment including their socioeconomic
empowerment” under the federal government’s 11th Five-Year Plan (2013-18), and the ‘Treaty
Implementation Cells’ “established at the national as well as provincial levels”.
It is aggravating business, reading these details. If the money has indeed been disbursed, ordinary
Pakistani women who are its purported beneficiaries have never heard of and have little idea of how
to avail the resources supposedly set aside for them. Not only is there a lack of political will to tackle
the challenges of violence against women or socioeconomic under-development, there is also the
age-old problem of lack of accountability and transparency.

The sum total is bad news for women’s rights. At the global level, the squabbling over the language
of the joint statement, the new coalition of countries that want to limit even the language (let alone
the actual implementation) of sexual and reproductive rights, all represent the opposite of the
collaborative and progressive spirit in which the original Beijing Declaration was made.

What is true in tone and tenor of the global is true also of the local. Despite all the expenditures
listed in the report (and there are many, I have only listed a few) there seems to be little political will
to ensure that women are actually receiving the money.

With the international framework for women’s rights flailing, it is perhaps no surprise that no one
has bothered to publicise the report in Pakistan (it is available online via the UN website). If more
Pakistanis, particularly Pakistani women, were to look at its contents, they would (like me) be quite
bewildered to learn how good things look on paper and the great deal of effort the government is
making on their behalf.

SOCIETY: WHY AREN’T MORE WOMEN WORKING?

The present government has laid much emphasis on human development as its priority focus. Many
initiatives have been undertaken in this regard — including, but not limited to, the comprehensive
Ehsaas programme for the creation of a ‘welfare state’. These include promoting financial inclusion
and access to digital services, supporting the economic empowerment of women, focusing on the
role of human capital formation for poverty eradication, economic growth and sustainable
development, and overcoming financial barriers to accessing health and post-secondary education.

These measures are expected to bring an overall improvement in the country’s dismal ranking in the
Human Development Index (HDI), where Pakistan stands at 150 out of 189 countries and territories,
with the second last HDI amongst the Saarc countries. If the government wants to harness the
potential of almost half the population of Pakistan, it needs to improve employment outcomes for
women, by addressing the economic as well as non-economic measures required for human
development.

However, increasing job opportunities and skills training is not enough. Improving the quality and
conditions of employment for women is equally crucial.

Despite getting higher education almost at the same rate as men, only a fraction of our educated
women are entering the workforce

Pakistan’s Gender Inequality Index (GII) ranking is 133 out of 160 countries in the 2017 Index. This
ranking indicates gender-based inequalities in three dimensions — reproductive health (maternal
mortality and adolescent birth rates), empowerment (parliamentary seats held by women and
attainment in secondary and higher education) and economic activity (labour market participation
rate) of women.

There has been considerable progress in the areas of reproductive health and representation of
women. Statistics for secondary and higher education attainment are also on the rise, achieving near
gender parity and, at times, greater number of females in universities for some subjects. However,
Pakistan faces a critical issue in terms of low labour market participation for women and its inability
to engage educated women in the workforce.

An important driver of growth and development in the 21st century, women’s participation or the
lack of it in Pakistan’s case is resulting in an almost 30 percent loss to the country’s productivity due
to non- inclusive policies.

The Pakistan Labour Force Survey (2017-18) shows a dismal 22.8 percent women’s participation rate
in the labour force, in comparison with 81.1 percent male participation for people aged 15 and
above. Young women are further disadvantaged, as 65 percent of young Pakistani women are not in
employment, education or training (NEET), one of the highest youth NEET rates among developing
countries. Hence, the female labour force comes primarily from uneducated or women from rural
areas educated upt primary level in school. Put simply, Pakistan’s educated women are not entering
the workforce.

Why is it that while women are getting higher education almost at the same rate as men, only a
fraction of women with post-secondary education are employed? The Punjab Social and Economic
Wellbeing of Women Survey (2017-18) shows that, of the total women in the age bracket of 18-29
years, 22 percent had attained grade 12 or above education but only 5.5 percent were employed.
The numbers are more lamentable for women from minority religious communities (11 percent have
grade 12 or above education and only 2.6 percent are employed).

Unlike a few decades ago, women are now increasingly encouraged to receive education but not
necessarily for the purpose of obtaining gainful employment. Their education is aimed instead at
improving their marriage prospects. Consequently, women are neither educated, nor trained in
technical subjects.

The Punjab Gender Parity Report shows that, in 2016-17, the number of female students enrolled in
pre- engineering and commerce degrees was less than half of male students. Statistics from the
Pakistan Council of Science and Technology further show that only 30 percent women are in
research and development, as opposed to 70 percent males in Pakistan. Labour statistics in Pakistan
also show that women are concentrated in non-technical, low-paying jobs, often in the informal
sectors, that decrease better job prospects and job security for them, thereby increasing their
vulnerability.

The broken supply line, originating often in lower numbers of women in technical subjects such as
science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), constitutes a basic reason. Medicine is
the only exception, where more women are enrolled in comparison with men. However, there are
social rather than economic reasons behind this choice of profession, which have created the
phenomenon of a large number of ‘doctor brides’ in Pakistan.

A bigger challenge is inequitable and sometimes unwelcoming workplaces for women with rigid
employment models, poor facilities, lack of a critical mass of women to support each other, absence
of role models in senior leadership and weak grievance compensation mechanisms. These challenges
are all rooted in the complex social trends and powerful cultural norms that create gender role
expectations and shape women’s choices and experiences in the labour market.
An examination of the social context and its reform requires a well-thought-out long-term strategy
that is beyond the purview of this article. However, a few key measures to improve transition rates
for women from higher education to employment are explained here.

It is encouraging to note that government policies encourage women’s education and technical and
vocational skills acquisition. However, to improve transition rates from higher education to
employment, active government interventions are needed to encourage women’s participation in
high skill and technologically advanced education and training programmes. A starting point would
be introducing incentives and quotas (if needed) at the education and vocational training institutions
for greater enrolment in STEM education and skills. These should also be accompanied with effective
career counselling programmes in higher education institutions, delivered in a public-private
partnership model to ensure sharing of current knowledge and opportunities.

Another solution lies in improving employment models, workplace facilities and workplace
environments for women. Various surveys have shown that the major obstacles to women’s
employment, cited by women themselves, include domestic responsibilities, childcare and poor
public transport. The problem of working with male colleagues and the incidence of sexual
harassment at the workplace are also cited as important factors affecting women’s choice to work.

A greater flexibility in jobs can help bring women with domestic responsibilities into the job market.
The age of digitisation and connectedness provides facilities that can be utilised in this respect.
Rethinking job models to make them outcome-based rather than process-based will enable women
to work from home or have reduced hours at the workplace.

Quality childcare in government and private workplaces is also necessary to help women balance
their roles as mothers. The Punjab government has introduced daycare centre support for
organisations. The efficacy and quality of childcare services should be assessed and, if found useful,
childcare should be introduced vigorously across the country. Other necessary facilities, such as
separate washrooms and safe/reliable public transport must be provided. Most importantly, without
strict implementation of the laws and policies addressing workplace harassment of women, it is
impossible to bring and retain women in employment.

Employment is not only a source of income generation and independence for a woman, but also
raises her status in the eyes of her family and society. To improve women’s autonomy and
employment outcomes, a massive social engineering endeavour is required that will reshape
regressive cultural and social norms around women’s roles and place them in the high skill labour
force. This could be premised on the significance of women’s participation in the nation’s growth.

The government’s current push for women’s empowerment, demonstrated in various policies and
programmes, will hopefully help shape this narrative and lead to enhanced participation of educated
women in Pakistan’s journey to prosperity.

For women’s empowerment

AS a welcome change, this year’s May Day celebrations, demonstrations and debates gave
considerable space not only to the challenges faced by women workers but also to the bitter
struggle the women of this country have been forced to wage for realising their elementary rights.

The list of these challenges is quite long and formidable: denial of right to work, non-recognition of
women’s work, non-payment for work done by women, denial of a fair wage, gaps in the legislation
needed to protect women’s rights, non-implementation of laws that have already been enacted,
non- recognition of informal-sector workers, and, above all, prevalence of an environment that
perpetuates and reinforces gender inequality by the day.

Some of these issues are already on the official agenda. For instance, the demands of home-based
workers for their entitlements. The organisations working for them estimate their number at 8.5
million but they could be more. Most of them are women. They are among the worst exploited
category of workers. Unexceptionable are their demands for the ratification of ILO Convention 189,
for domestic legislation required for their recognition as workers, and for creation of a monitoring
system to ensure that what the law provides for is actually available to them.

Even a cursory look at the problems faced by women will reveal that they are interrelated and
interdependent.

The Punjab government has at least promised acceptance of their demands and now it is being
pressed to honour its word. There is no reason why home-based workers should be obliged to keep
marching under a blazing sun for the most basic of their rights.

The fact that organised labour has been in a state of retreat for quite some time means that the
grievances of women in the civil labour force have been multiplying. They will continue to suffer
more than all-male trade unions as the ruling elite is unlikely to be cured of its obsession with free-
market mantras, including the shady deals under the cover of privatisation.

Even a cursory look at the problems faced by women will reveal that they are interrelated and
interdependent. Each problem has been aggravated by lack of state will to resolve it.

The time has perhaps come to remove this main obstacle to women’s freedom by demonstrating the
state’s will to go the whole length for achieving gender equality by adopting a long-term plan for
women’s empowerment. What this goal means should largely be decided by women themselves.
During the interregnum the state and civil society should concentrate on building up women’s
capacity to cover the final lap to their rightful place in society.

The long-term strategy will obviously include a mechanism for filling gaps in legislation as well as for
evaluating implementation of pro-women laws made over the past two decades, and especially
since 2004, in order to make their enforceability certain. In order to ensure women’s ability to grab
their share of jobs it will be necessary to extend to them educational facilities and an adequate
health cover. The failure to realise the Millennium Development Goals must spur the administration
to improve its performance while addressing the Strategic Development Goals.

An important factor of women’s emancipation can be an increase in their role in local government
institutions. The Sindh government’s decision to increase women’s representation in local bodies to
33pc is worthy of emulation by other provinces. But symbolic representation will not be enough; the
women local leaders must be helped to address all of citizens’ problems, including their vulnerability
to preachers of hate and promoters of conflict.

Instead of creating new vehicles for promoting women’s empowerment, the task can be assigned to
the national and provincial commissions on the status of women after enlarging their scope of work
and guaranteeing them the physical and material resources required. Besides developing and
executing their three- or five-year programmes they should also function as tribunals to receive and
address women’s grievances about the denial of their due.
Women and empowerment

Social and political spaces of expression for women have increasingly been squeezed in Pakistan
over the years. The concerted social media vilification campaigns run against outspoken women by
our misogynists, in the millions, are one of the indicators of our societal downfall.

The facts of our downfall stare at us with an alarming caution that Pakistan has become one of the
worst places for women to live in. Let us dwell on some of these alarming facts to make sense of the
appalling state of affairs vis-a-vis women’s rights in Pakistan.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report (2017), Pakistan ranks 136th on the attainment of
education index, 140th on health and survival and 95th on the political empowerment of women,
out of the 144 countries assessed in the report. Pakistan scored 0.546 overall on a scale wherein a
score of 1.0 represents parity and 0 represents imparity. The country’s female/male population ratio
was recorded at 1.06. The index denotes the country’s widening gender gap over the decade, as it
ranked 112 out of 115 in the year 2006. In the 2017 index, Pakistan only beats Yemen, whereas,
interestingly, war-torn Syria is ahead of Pakistan.

The fifth objective of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aims to end all forms of
discrimination and violence against women and girls. This includes eliminating harmful practices,
ensuring women’s full participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-
making, and adopting and strengthening policies and legislation to promote gender equality. There
are also a number of international conventions providing some overarching policy principles for the
promulgation of context- specific provisions in the national constitution to ensure the protection and
promotion of women’s rights.

In addition to SDGs, Pakistan has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and other

international commitments to uphold, protect and promote the rights of women. Pakistan’s
constitution has defined protection against gender-based violence as one of the fundamental rights
in Article 25(2). Article 26(2) of the constitution provides for affirmative action or positive
discrimination to ensure that women have equal access to opportunities that they are otherwise
denied in a male-dominated society.

Despite the fact that Pakistan is signatory to most of the international conventions on women’s
rights and has a constitution that provides legal protection to women against violence, we have
failed to build a gender-sensitive society. Our downfall as a society is becoming imminent with each
passing day as we hear about the tragic news of women being lynched for speaking truth to power.
Our religious clerics, scholars of secular pursuits, politicos, journalists, human rights activists, the
legal fraternity as well as the educated classes have all failed to create a counter-narrative against
male chauvinism that holds sway on the media and public discourse today. We suffer from collective
amnesia when it comes to acting upon constitutional covenants and our international commitments
on women’s rights.

Women’s empowerment is not only about upholding the fundamental rights enshrined in our
constitution and the international conventions that we have ratified. It is also about sustainable
economic development and prosperity of this country, the progress of which is marred by the
exclusion of 49 percent of its population from participating in its development. How can a country
prosper if half of its population has been left out from participating in nation-building processes?
Equitable development is the precursor for sustainable change in the lives of the most vulnerable
segment of our society, ie women.

Women in Pakistan face dual exploitation. One is their structural exclusion from the mainstream
institutions of representation and policymaking, and the other is the behavioural and attitudinal
animosity of a patriarchal society. In a nutshell, the practice and discourse of development, and
representation and empowerment in Pakistan, is shaped by a feudal mindset, which then adds to
the popular notion of women being subservient to their male partners.

The perspective that has influenced the discourse on women’s empowerment in our contemporary
theory of change stems from the feminist view of the equality of the sexes. This means appreciating,
articulating and ensuring equal rights for women in all spheres of life. To me, this must be the
outcome of institutional and policy reforms to enforce constitutional and statutory provisions.
Having said that, we cannot ascertain the equality of the sexes only through changes in the mindsets
and without attempting to dislodge the power structures of subjugation. The unreconstructed
postcolonial institutional structures are built around the masculinity of power and subjugate the
weaker one. We need a major overhaul to challenge the power structures of subjugation through
radical institutional reforms.

These radical institutional reforms worked well in Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil and many
other developing countries in which the status of women has significantly improved as compared
with Pakistan. I hope that the new elected government will undertake some drastic policy reforms to
build well-governed and inclusive institutions of representation. In our case, this means unleashing
the transformative potential of 50 percent of the country’s population, who will play a critical role in
the progress and prosperity of Pakistan.

The central principle that governed the agenda of reforms in these countries was the political will of
the leadership to formulate inclusive development programmes and invest in creating and sustaining
women’s institutions. Run by women, these institutions proved to be a bulwark against physical and
structural violence. The genesis of women’s own institutions in Bangladesh goes back to the 1970s.
These institutions received undisrupted government support for decades, which came to fruition in
the form of improved gender equity in the country. In Pakistan, one such institution for women’s

empowerment was set up in 1982 with the establishment of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme
(AKRSP) in Gilgit-Baltistan. But the government’s support for this institution dwindled over the years.

Today, we have some success stories that have the potential to create a radical change through
locally informed institutional responses to the multiple vulnerabilities of women. The most apt
example of this is the Sindh government-funded Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Programme
(UCBPRP) and its successor the EU-funded Sindh Union Council and Community Economic
Strengthening Support (SUCCESS) Programme – being implemented by the Rural Support
Programmes (RSPs) under the technical supervision of the Rural Support Programme Network
(RSPN).

SUCCESS exclusively organises rural women in their own grassroots institutions and helps them
climb out of poverty through skill-development, income diversification interventions and linking
them up with government services and supplies. The programme envisages to impact two million
poor women in eight districts across the province of Sindh. The women who formed their own local
organisations included those who neither had a voice nor economic wherewithal to assert their
position in a male-dominant and conservative society.

The process of mobilising women as the primary actors of change has created a pragmatic and
sustainable model that must be replicated in order to get a larger impact, and must have consistent
governmental support across the country. Interestingly, these rural women have representation in
the district development committees along with all the district line departments chaired by the
deputy commissioner, with the aim of reshaping the local development agenda in favour of the poor
and women.

This process of engagement has put women at the centre of the household economy and decision-
making. SUCCESS is a good prospect for formulating evidence-based women’s empowerment
policies, both to meet our development targets, and fulfil our commitment to SDGs and other
international conventions.

Empowering women of Pakistan

For a mother’s emancipation is deliverance of the entire family

Empowering women with better education, being sensitive towards their health problems, ensuring
equal job opportunities and respecting their rights will go a long way in transforming Pakistan. This
should also be a major motivation for them to vote.

Experience has reaffirmed that countries progress fast where women are educated and receive
equal treatment as men. For a mother’s emancipation is deliverance of the entire family. A recent
IMF study using empirical data and research statistics “determines that women’s economic
empowerment is key to growth” and could boost Pakistan’s GDP by 30%.

Pakistan’s Constitution, as per Article 25 (2), is emphatic about giving equal rights to women.
Unfortunately, despite this discrimination persists because of the failure of governance and
antiquated customs. Thus the question is not only to educate the people but also to create
conditions whereby those women who are contributing in socio-economic development are
encouraged and feel safe in their working environment.

Apart from Pakistan being committed to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) relevant to
gender equality and improving maternal health, there is also a legal requirement as Pakistan is a
signatory to the UN convention for “Elimination of all form of Discrimination against Women”. The
concept of gender equality has to be inculcated right from the school and college level because it is a
question of changing the mindset.

In Pakistan’s context, clergy’s support and understanding is critical for promoting women’s
emancipation. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) always promoted the due rites of women and gave them
the highest respect. There is no reason why Pakistani women in anyway should lag behind in
attributes of health, education and empowerment.

We have the example of several countries that have hugely benefited as a result of women being
given equal rights. Sweden is one country that is in the forefront in gender equality and
emancipation of women and has undertaken several measures through legislation and
implementation of reforms. Clearly, there is huge disparity between the levels of development,
attitudes and culture between Pakistan and Sweden. Yet it would be relevant to share some of the
experience for the benefit of Pakistan.
Feminist policy that Sweden pursues aims at ensuring that women and men have the same power to
shape society and their own lives — gender equality. This is a goal in itself. Moreover, it also acts as
an essential determinant for achievements in all other important policy areas.

An overwhelming burden of evidence, from all corners of the world, support the fact that gender
equality goes hand in hand with economic and social development of any society. Whereas it is
equally true that gender inequality pulls the country down by slowing down progress in all fields.

For more than a century, successive reforms undertaken by Swedish governments have
strengthened women’s economic and political rights. Social and wide-ranging welfare reforms have
allowed a growing number of women to work outside the household to earn an income and pay
taxes. Other reforms have contributed to equal representation of women and men in
democratically-elected forums.

As a result, Sweden has gradually grown from a time when poverty and famine was a reality, forcing
th
a third of the population to emigrate in the late 19 century, to one of the most developed
economies in the world and ranking high on all socio-economic ratings. Today, a population of 10
million generates a GDP roughly twice as much that of Pakistan. It is indeed a remarkable
achievement notwithstanding there are other factors as well that contribute to this wide disparity in
GDP. Sweden is a small country that depends on innovation and export, and therefore needs all its
citizens to be educated and to work diligently. As high as 74% of the available female workforce is
professionally active in the formal economy — the highest in Europe, contributing not only to the
standard of living of their own households but also to the growth of national economy. Sweden’s
goal of empowering women is supported by compatible social policies such as the paid parental
leave, which is gender-neutral.

In October 2014, the incoming Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén took this development to the next level,
declaring his incoming government a feminist government, the first one in the world to do so. With a
century-long legacy of working towards gender equality in society and already at the top of
international rankings, one may wonder why did he do that? Why push it even further may be on
the minds of many. Was it just a means to attract female voters? No, the elections had already
passed and the new government ready to start its work. Instead, the reason is a much more basic
one: increased gender equality in society and the economy brings sustainable growth and stability.
Quite simply — it makes very smart politics!

By mainstreaming gender policy, all branches of government are made equally responsible and
accountable to identify gender gaps within their areas of responsibility and implement measures to
remedy these. And by introducing systematic, gender-based budgeting, each policy proposal is
assessed on its gender equality merits. This applies for all government branches and agencies.

In Sweden’s feminist foreign policy, equal access to rights, resources and representation is a
cornerstone, actively promoted in all international forums. By applying a systematic gender
perspective in peace, security, trade and development efforts, the Swedish government expects to
contribute to real progress for gender equality and for sustainable peace, growth and stability.

Emancipation of women in Pakistan is a great challenge that cannot be taken for granted. It will
require sincere effort by successive governments and civil society spread over years to work for the
common good of its people.