MEET Safia: she’s a young woman who works part-time in the Apple Store in Walnut Creek, close to San Francisco. She talked very knowledgeably about options for the new laptop I wanted to buy, and I discovered she was originally from Afghanistan, and is now studying for a law degree. Confident and very bright, I have no doubt she will make a good lawyer.

Gul is another impressive young Afghan woman I recently met in California. She is a sales consultant at AT & T, and was very helpful when I went there to get a local SIM card for my cellphone. Her family migrated to the United States when she was very young, and she has not been back to Afghanistan ever since.

Arifa is a lawyer in Canada, and her parents fled Pakistan with their young children to escape the persecution and violence Ahmadis face constantly. She is now engaged to a fellow lawyer whose father was a senator, and grandfather a prime minister.

In their own ways, all three young women have bright futures, something denied to them in their countries of birth. Had they not migrated, I am sure their development would have been stunted, and they would never have reached their true potential. This is the fate of most of their sisters and mothers back home.

It is no coincidence that Pakistan and Afghanistan remain among the most socially backward countries in the world. With them at the bottom of the list are states like Somalia, Yemen and Mali. So while our politicians and generals squabble over power, perhaps one day they will find the time to address issues like gender equality and education for girls.

It is now a well-established fact that in countries that are doing well socially and economically, women enjoy equal rights. Successful Muslim states such as Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Turkey do not discriminate against women in the blatant way backward societies like ours do.

It is only logical that if half a nation’s population is locked out of the formal economy, then productivity is bound to suffer. But this gender-based hierarchy has other consequences. Illiterate mothers are likely to raise poorly educated children. Also, being unaware and powerless, they have no access to birth control information, and therefore tend to have large families. Both factors contribute to our backwardness.

These are well-documented facts, but continue to be ignored in deeply conservative countries like ours due to the power of clerics who seek to block social progress so they can hang on to the power they exercise over simple, uneducated minds. In Iraq, for instance, women made remarkable progress under the autocratic but secular government of Saddam Hussein. They were well represented in the professions, and were free to go about their business without having to cover themselves up as they now have to. But with the rise of dogmatic and violent Islamic groups, women have been pushed indoors and out of sight.

Much of this regressive mindset has been exported by Saudi Arabia. There, even in the 21st century, women are not allowed to drive, or travel without being accompanied by a male relative. Over decades of influencing Sunni Muslims across the world with their deeply conservative views, Wahabi clerics have succeeded in inculcating them with the same backward attitudes towards women.

The result is that even when they live the West, some Muslims tend to flaunt their newly acquired symbols of identity like the full niqab and unkempt beards in a way their parents didn’t. But it’s the women who suffer more than the men for this insistence on covering up every inch for they are viewed with suspicion and downright contempt by many. In their countries of origin, chances are their education — had they received any — would have been curtailed by an arranged marriage at an early age. There would be no prospect of a career, and a life of drudgery would stretch ahead.

This would have been the probable fate of Safia, Gul and Arifa had events not taken them to the West. Here, in an enabling and empowering environment, they have blossomed and thrived. Of course, all three must have had supportive parents who encouraged their daughters to engage with the culture they had chosen to make their own. But even if they hadn’t, education is compulsory, and if girls choose to, they can opt to make their own way without parental support.

In some ways, the balance has tilted the other way in many Western countries. Girls generally perform better than boys at school-leaving exams, and therefore secure more places at top colleges and universities. And as factory jobs migrate to the developing world, women can compete on equal footing for jobs that don’t require physical strength. It is now unusual to see women who don’t work. Forty-seven per cent of the American labour force consists of women, and this number is projected to grow to 51pc by 2018.

In Iran, by contrast, only 15pc of women are part of the formal labour force despite the fact that they take 60pc of all university places. A major reason they are not properly represented in the job market is the religious conservatism in Iran. Nevertheless, the population growth rate is only 1.3pc, thanks to the prevalence of education among women.

So when we ponder the reasons for our backwardness, we don’t have far to look. Even girls from privileged families are sequestered, and subjected to male tyranny in most cases. When the energy and creativity of half the population is wasted, how can a society progress?

The sad part is that we have gone backwards in the last fifty years when it comes to empowering women. I recall my mother cycling to her voluntary work in Karachi when I was a kid, and my cousins cycling to college in Lahore. This would be unthinkable today, and says a lot for the trajectory society is on.

Published in Dawn, August 25th, 2014