In Pakistan, women make up around 50 percent of the total population but unfortunately, they aren’t given their due representation in different domains at the national level. Though Pakistan has come a long way in making efforts for women empowerment, still many loopholes persist.

One of the biggest issues Pakistan faces in this regard is the gap between legal and substantive equality. Pakistan has made efficient progress by passing bills and policies that tend to empower and enable women in different way. However, since the implementation and uniform availability of the legal framework established for women is largely missing, there stands a huge gap between the legal and substantive equality. This gap shows that along with the few enablers to women’s empowerment, numerous constraints also persist which hamper the process of women’s empowerment hence slowing Pakistan’s progress in the pursuit of United Nation’s SDG-5. The article takes into account the enablers and disablers to women’s empowerment in Pakistan in different domains.

Legal Domain

At the legal level, some good legislation has been done in the favor of women’s empowerment. E.g. the sexual harassment at the workplace law of 2010, the provincial domestic violence acts, child marriage restraint act, the 2011 anti-women practices law, along with several other women-empowering laws and bills have been passed in the last 10 to 12 years. The establishment of such an intricate, gender sensitive legal system is a big enabler to the phenomenon of women’s empowerment because they can be accessed by women at the time of need. However, the issue of their proper implementation persists because accessing these laws is largely dependent on how many resources one has. One can access such services only when they have the power and resources to hire a lawyer and go to courts and fight their case. Another constraint is the discriminatory legislation, which is still protected under the Eighth Amendment in the constitution. But lots of new laws have come which have tried to basically redress some of the weaknesses of the previous discriminatory laws, for example, the 2016 criminal law against offences related to rape amends the Pakistan Penal Code of 1860 for good.

Political Domain

At the political level, the enablers are proper representation of women in politics and lawmaking bodies in the form of reserved seats for women, and the right to participate in direct elections. Out of the total 342 seats in the National Assembly, only 60 (17.5%) are reserved for women. However, the provincial governments have not done much to empower the local government systems.

Another issue is that the women who come to the assemblies through the reserved seats aren’t very powerful because their views are not taken seriously, they are generally considered unimportant members of the assembly, because they have to follow what their male counterparts say. So whatever the party head decides, they have to vote in that direction. However, sometimes women do cross party lines to get legislation passed in favor of women, because the idea of reserved seats for women was actually put forward by the women’s movement in Pakistan, in order to give women some voice.

Ideally there should be 50% representation of women in the national, provincial and local assemblies, as women constitute more than 50% of Pakistan’s population, but that is not the case. Another issue is the reluctance that many political parties show while awarding tickets to women. Sometimes political parties give a woman a ticket to fight an election where they know that they’re definitely losing the seat. It’s a very rare thing for women to get tickets for the seats, which the party knows that they are going to definitely win. And fortunately, we have seen few examples in the recent past.

Economic Domain

There are a lot of economic enablers and constraints. A very large part of our economy is informal, and the workers employed in this sector are not formally registered. For example, there are women who sit at home and make products like handicrafts, traditional outfits, jewelry etc. then the either the middle man sells them in the market or they themselves. But since they’re not registered, they aren’t paid well. Moreover, in the informal sector there’s nothing like minimum wage, social security, and medical benefits etc.

Such women were affected badly with the economic downfall, due to high inflation and low growth in the wake of COVID-19, as people stop shopping and the markets were closed, so there were no outlets for them to display their products and with the closure of transport service, they were unable to get raw materials for their products. Unfortunately, women constitute more than 71% of the informal economy, as women mostly do certain jobs from home, or in other people’s homes as domestic servants etc. hence they don’t have access to any of the rights that are granted to the labor force in the Constitution of Pakistan.

Social Domain

One of the biggest constraints on women’s rights, and women’s equality is any kind of violence against women, which is mostly in the name of culture, tradition, religion, and customs. Violence and the fear of violence keeps women out of the national affairs and keeps them confined to their homes. Unfortunately, women don’t only face physical violence, they are subject to economic, emotional and sexual violence, not just in public spaces, but sometimes also in their homes. So violence is a huge problem that actually keeps women disempowered. As a result of these patriarchal ideas, gender gaps are created in the education, health, and employment sector. The growing urban rural divide is another huge problem, because mostly women from urban areas get all the opportunities while the rural women stay sidelined hence left with no other option than joining the informal economic sector. The privatization of even fundamental rights granted in the constitution have made them inaccessible for general public.

It must be kept in mind that holistic changes need to be brought in all the above mentioned sectors to achieve the goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Another important point to be mentioned here is that large scale changes can only be brought when all the citizens understand their responsibility towards this goal and are ready to bring changes in their thinking patterns and personalities at the individual level. This can be done by publicly advocating women’s rights and the significance that the phenomenon of women’s empowerment holds for national development. So that all the citizens play their role in women’s empowerment considering it a national duty.