KARACHI, Oct 27: Speakers at a seminar, on Saturday, said that though religion and the constitution have guaranteed many rights to women, they are not being given the same due to social and cultural traditions.

Speaking at the seminar on “Status of Women”, organized by the Pakistan Federation of Business and Professional Women, they said that women will have to wage a long and difficult struggle to get their due rights.

Citing the example of women who have made a name for themselves in their respective fields, they said that whenever given equal opportunities, women have proved that they are not inferior to their male counterparts in any way.

They, however, regretted that the few women who had reached top slots in their respective careers and fields had done little to improve the status of their fellow womenfolk.

Expressing concern that women were discriminated against from the very beginning, they said that many families would opt for abortion if they came to know, in time, that an expecting mother would deliver a girl-child.

Elaborating this discriminatory attitude, they said that though women comprised almost 50 per cent of the population, the literacy rate among them was much lower than that of men. Besides, violence against women was a common occurrence and even the police did not report a majority of the cases relating to domestic violence, and asked the parties to go home and sort it out between themselves.

They said that women are not considered human beings in many places but as property. They are exchanged to settle tribal feuds, etc, or even killed in the name of honour (Karo-kari).

Highlighting that the lap of the mother is the first place of learning, they urged women to groom their children — particularly their sons — in such a way that when they grow up, they treat their womenfolk with respect.

They said that there were some laws — such as the Hudood Ordinance, Law of Evidence, etc, — that were discriminatory towards women and should be repealed.

They said that the population of women in country prisons had multiplied manifold after the promulgation of the Hudood Ordinance by the late Gen Zia-ul-Haq in the mid 80s.

They said that Pakistan was also a signatory to many international conventions dealing with women issues, such as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, etc, and was supposed to formulate all its laws in conformity. But nothing much has been done so far, they added.

They urged women to take part in political activities so that they could reach law-making positions or at least influence the process. In that way, they said that women would not only be able to stop discriminatory legislations from being formulated but would even be able to change, review or even abolish the prevailing discriminatory legislation.

They urged the government to give more representation to women in the Islamic Ideology Council, so that they could present their case properly in the highest body that reviews the existing or suggests the formulation of new legislations.

They said that there were only 1.5 per cent women members in the last National Assembly, as compared to 8.6 women members in the Indian Lok Sabha. They added that they were not comparing figures from the more-developed western countries where women enjoyed much better positions.

The meeting also adopted a resolution expressing concern over the current Afghanistan conflict leading to the huge loss of human lives, particularly women, children and the old. It also called for an immediate end to the continuous bombing.

Mazhar-ul-Haq Siddiqui, Tazeen Faridi, Zarin Aziz, Akram Khatoon, Dr Salima Ahmad, Mumtaz Rashdi, Dr Hamida Khuhro, Dr Fateh Mohammad Soomro, Shirin Rahmatullah, Pervin Shaikh, Masoodah Ahmad, Zia Awan, Mushtaq Memon, Shehla A. Abbasi, Sheen Farukh and others also spoke.