PAKISTAN’S export economy runs on women’s work. Walk through a stitching unit in Faisalabad or a cotton field in southern Punjab and this is obvious. Yet open the audit reports, supplier scorecards and compliance files that govern access to our largest export markets and the women largely disappear: present in the aggregate headcount, absent from the wage data, the grievance logs, the risk assessments. For decades this invisibility was commercially convenient. It is now becoming a commercial liability.
The reason is a quiet shift in how our buyers are regulated. The European Union, which takes roughly a third of Pakistan’s exports under GSP-Plus preferences, adopted its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive in 2024. Brussels narrowed its scope this March. Some have read that as a reprieve; it’s not: the companies still covered, above 5,000 employees and 1.5 billion in turnover, are precisely the brands ordering from Pakistan, and will comply by pushing questionnaires down the chain. The directive does not treat risk as gender-neutral. The OECD, whose framework underpins it, is blunt in a new case study on gender in supply chains: gendered harms are systemic, informal and often invisible, and due diligence that does not look for them will not find them.
A brand’s compliance team in Amsterdam reviews your file. Your audits show no findings on harassment, no discrimination, no gender pay gap because pay data was never disaggregated by sex. Ten years ago, that was a clean file. Today it invites a harder question. A nationally representative survey in Bangladesh found a third of women garment workers reporting workplace harassment. Pakistan has no equivalent figure; nobody has counted; that gap is the red flag. The Time Use Survey 2007showed women carrying roughly 11 times the unpaid care work of men. That imbalance decides who can accept overtime, who gets promoted and who ends up in the home-based operations that audits never reach. An audit that finds nothing is no longer proof of a clean operation. It is proof that nobody looked. Silence in the data has stopped being reassuring.
Pakistani industry has been slow to register this. Gender in the supply chain is still filed under corporate social responsibility. It has quietly become an order-book issue. The suppliers who retain European business will be those able to answer a buyer’s questionnaire with credible, sex-disaggregated evidence: who works where and on what contract, what women are paid relative to men, whether grievance channels are used by women. The suppliers who cannot will not be dropped for having problems; they will be dropped for being unable to show they know what their problems are. Under a due diligence regime, the unknowable supplier is the risky supplier.
Pakistan’s export sectors were built on the labour of women.
There is an opportunity here. Pakistan competes against Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia, all facing the same tide; the first to equip its exporters to respond credibly gains an advantage no tariff schedule can provide. Some raw material exists: the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act, strengthened in 2022, and the Sindh Home-Based Workers Act 2018. At CERB, we have documented what happens when companies treat women’s inclusion as supply chain strategy rather than philanthropy. One of the country’s largest denim exporters, took its Cotton Initiative into the fields it sources from, training women farmers and building supplementary household incomes; the gains run from women’s earnings and decision-making power to the resilience of the company’s own cotton base. A companion study in dairy, Nourishing Lives, traces the impact on empowering women in milk supply chain. These are commercial firms strengthening supply chains they depend on.
The task divides naturally. Exporters should stop treating the absence of complaints as an achievement and start measuring what the new regimes ask about: pay, contract type and grievance uptake, broken down by sex. Industry associations should build shared tools, because a questionnaire answered well once can be answered well a hundred times. And government, which lobbies Brussels hard for GSP-Plus renewal, must recognise that its strongest submission is not diplomatic but evidentiary — a demonstrable effort to make these women visible, counted and protected.
None of this requires solving deep structural inequality before the next order cycle. Due diligence regimes do not demand perfection; they demand honesty about risk and seriousness about addressing it. What they punish is blindness. Pakistan’s export sectors were built on the labour of women the system was designed not to see. The buyers can no longer afford that arrangement. Soon, neither can we.
The writer is a senior manager sustainability at the Pakistan Business Council’s Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business.
Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2026