Gender gap rethink
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THE World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 has placed Pakistan among the bottom 10 nations globally. However, a critical examination reveals that the report’s framework — while useful for global benchmarking — misses key nuances, especially when applied to South Asian societies with vastly different social, economic and historical realities. By focusing primarily on formal metrics and ignoring informal labour, cultural norms and grassroots empowerment, it underestimates real gender progress in the region.
The report offers valuable cross-national insights based on standardised outcomes. However, its methodology reflects Western-centric biases and omits vital sociocultural nuances prevalent in South Asia.
The WEF index measures relative gaps between men and women in the same country, not absolute conditions for women. This means a country like Pakistan, where access to education, employment and healthcare is generally limited for both genders, will inevitably score low — not just because women are left behind, but because the overall base is already weak. Importantly, South Asia as a whole ranks second-last globally in gender parity. Pakistan is not an outlier, but rather reflects a regional trend marked by shared historical burdens, colonial legacies and cultural complexities.
The WEF’s framework rewards countries that align with Western models of empowerment — measuring success through female representation in corporate boardrooms, parliament seats and formal wage employment. However, this framework discounts the informal sector, community roles and unpaid care work — spaces where millions of Pakistani women actively contribute. The report does not reflect the significant presence of Pakistani women in education, medicine, agriculture, informal trade, social work and activism. Nor does it consider cultural systems where women exert influence through family or community structures.
The WEF report is structurally one-sided.
Furthermore, the report is structurally one-sided: it penalises countries where women lag behind men but treats parity for maximum scoring without taking into account inter-generational progress. This asymmetry distorts the comparative narrative. Despite structural challenges, Pakistan has made important strides over the last two decades.
Education: Female literacy has increased from around 35 per cent in 2001 to over 50pc in 2024 and female students now make up 48pc of higher education enrolments.
Labour: While female labour force participation remains low (around 22–23pc), it has more than doubled since 2001. Legal reforms recognising home-based women workers (around 3.6 million) as formal labour, allowing access to social security and labour protections.
Legal advances: Pakistan has updated harassment laws, introduced cybercrime redress mechanisms, and legally recognised the third gender.
By focusing solely on national-level political representation, the report overlooks the growing presence of women in local councils, school boards and community health programmes. The question, then, is not whether gender inequality exists in Pakistan (it does) but whether the tools we use to measure it are fair, inclusive and context-aware. The metrics should examine lived realities to make assessment more grounded.
Countries that score high on the index are not immune to gender-based inequality. High rankings can conceal internal inequities. Low rankings can mask important progress. Without a critical eye on both ends, we risk drawing simplistic conclusions from complex realities.
The WEF report offers useful insights. But it must apply a more just lens to evolve. Suggested improvements include: measuring unpaid labour via time-use surveys; including local governance and informal sector influence; adopting a two-sided gap model that reflects male disadvantages too; contextualising economic participation with cultural and infrastructural constraints; and enhancing data quality by triangulating from independent sources.
Pakistan, like many Global South countries, faces deep-rooted developmental and structural challenges. The systemic transitions in economics and social spheres are slow but equating these gaps with societal failure or moral collapse is misleading and demoralising. What’s needed is global cooperation, fairer metrics, and stronger support for grassroots reform, and not international shaming or dismissal of non-Western pathways to empowerment.
Pakistani women are not passive victims of circumstance; they are active agents of change. From courtrooms to classrooms, and fields to the front lines of activism, they are reshaping their society—often without global acknowledgment. The report needs to go beyond rankings and towards context for a fair assessment.
The writer is chief executive of the Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change.
Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2025
