A recent report by the International Labour Organization says that women in wage employment earn substantially lower wages than their male counterparts in Pakistan. According to the ILO, on average, women around the world are paid 80 cents for every dollar paid to men. This gap in earnings for the same work or work of equal value is called the gender pay gap — currently estimated to be at 20% globally. However, the magnitude of the gender pay gap in Pakistan is among the highest when compared to other lower-middle-income countries. The report, Gender Pay Gap in Pakistan: An Empirical Analysis and Policy Implications reveals that Pakistani women earn 25% less per hour and 30% less per month than their male counterparts “even when they have similar qualifications and experience, and are employed in comparable roles”.
Although the numbers are quite staggering, the findings of this report are not surprising. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 placed Pakistan at the bottom of 148 countries. The ILO and WEF reports show that much more needs to be done for women empowerment in Pakistan. This is a country where we have had the first female prime minister of a Muslim country. We also have our first female chief minister of a province. But this is not enough. We need more women in the workforce but we also need to ensure that there is no discrimination when it comes to wages. For this to happen, many things need to change.
In his Dawn article, “Candidates for Election 2024”, the president of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development And Transparency, Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, revealed how women candidates nominated by political parties for general seats for the 2024 general elections barely accounted for 4.77% for the National Assembly and provincial assemblies taken together. He pointed out that this was “lower than the minimum 5 [per cent] threshold prescribed in the Elections Act, 2017, for each party to follow”. Political analysts say that most political parties only nominate women from general seats since they are required to do so under the rules but they end up nominating women on seats they believe are unwinnable. There are exceptions, of course, but it is quite common to see political parties fielding women candidates from seats they are most likely to lose. It is also astonishing to see that when party tickets are being allotted, many political parties do not have sufficient female representation in their committees that finalise the names of candidates. We cannot expect things to change on the ground when our political class excludes women from the decision-making process.
There must be more representation of women in political parties and in Parliament. Our judiciary needs more women in its ranks as well. We got our first woman justice in the Supreme Court barely three years ago. We do not have many women in decision-making positions in our media either. In a patriarchal society like ours, a change in mindset is needed. Opinionated women are frowned upon in our society. Independent women are vilified. The portrayal of working women in our television drama (barring a few honourable exceptions) is always negative. From a very early age, women are told what is the proper way for them to sit, speak, eat and so on. If women speak loudly, they are labelled as being ‘too emotional’ whereas a man doing so is just being ‘manly’. This is what we women are fighting against every day.
We are also fighting against the ‘boys club’ in our professional lives. Our work culture, thus, also needs to change. We need more women in decision-making positions; we need daycare centres in offices; and we need more women to make our policies. From politics to the judiciary to our media to sports to all other walks of life, we need more women to be in charge. Until this happens, the magnitude of the gender pay gap will not change and our ranking on the gender gap report will not change either.
Mehmal Sarfraz is a journalist based in Lahore; mehmal.s@gmail.com