December, 2010

Women in Pakistan have been confronted with four important challenges since the end of 20th century: increasing practical literacy, gaining access to employment opportunities at all levels in the economy, promoting change in the perception of women's roles and status, and gaining a public voice both within and outside of the political process.

Since partition, the changing status of women has been largely linked with discourse about the role of Islam in a modern state. This debate concerns the extent to which civil rights common in most Western democracies are appropriate in an Islamic society and the way these rights should be reconciled with Islamic family law.

Muslim reformers in the 19th century struggled to introduce female education, to ease some of the restrictions on women's activities, to limit polygamy, and to ensure women's rights under Islamic law. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was the first man who convened the Mohammedan Educational Conference in the 1870s to promote modern education for Muslims, and founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. Among the predominantly male participants were many of the earliest proponents of education and improved social status for women. They advocated cooking and sewing classes conducted in a religious framework to improve and advance women's knowledge and skills and to reinforce Islamic values. But progress in women's literacy was slow: by 1921 only four out of every 1,000 Muslim females were literate.

Promoting women education was a first step in moving beyond the constraints imposed by purdah. The nationalist struggle helped fray the threads in that socially imposed curtain. Simultaneously, women's roles were questioned, and their empowerment was linked to the larger issues of nationalism and independence. In 1937 the Muslim Personal Law restored rights (such as inheritance of property) that had been lost by women under the Anglicization of certain civil laws. As independence neared, it appeared that the state would give priority to empowering women. Pakistan's founding father, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said in a speech in 1944:
“No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you; we are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.”
After independence, elite Muslim women continued to advocate women's political empowerment through legal reforms. They mobilized support that led to passage of the Muslim Personal Law of Sharia in 1948, which recognized a woman's right to inherit all forms of property. They were also behind the futile attempt to have the government include a Charter of Women's Rights in the 1956 constitution. The 1961 Muslim Family Laws Ordinance covering marriage and divorce, the most important socio-legal reform that they supported, is still widely regarded as empowering women.

Two issues — promotion of women's political representation and accommodation between Muslim family law and democratic civil rights — came to dominate discourse about women and socio-legal reform.

The second issue gained considerable attention during Zia-ul-Haq regime (1977-88). Women living in urban areas formed groups to protect their rights against apparent discrimination under Zia's Islamization programme. It was in the highly visible realm of law that women were able to articulate their objections to the Islamization programme initiated by the then government in 1979. Protests against the 1979 Enforcement of Hudood Ordinances focused on the failure of Hudood ordinances to distinguish between adultery (zina) and rape (zina-bil-jabr). A man could be convicted in a zina only if he were actually observed committing the offense by other men, but a woman could be given sentence simply because she became pregnant.

The Women's Action Forum (WAF) was formed in 1981 to respond to the implementation of the penal code and to strengthen women's position in society. The women in the forum perceived that many laws proposed by the Zia government were discriminatory and would compromise their civil status. In Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad the group agreed on collective leadership and formulated policy statements and engaged in political action to protect women's legal position. The WAF has played a central role in exposing the controversy regarding various interpretations of Islamic law and its role in a modern state, and in publicizing ways in which women can play a more active role in politics. Its members led public protests in the mid-1980s against the promulgation of the Law of Evidence. Although the final version was substantially modified, the WAF objected to the legislation because it gave unequal and unjust weight to testimony by men and women in financial cases. Fundamentally, they objected to the assertion that women and men cannot participate as legal equals in economic affairs.

Beginning in August 1986, the WAF members and their supporters led a debate over passage of the Shariat Bill, which decreed that all laws in Pakistan should conform to Islamic law. They argued that the law would undermine the principles of justice, democracy, and fundamental rights of citizens, and they pointed out that Islamic law would become identified solely with the conservative interpretation supported by the Zia's government. Most activists felt that the Shariat Bill had the potential to negate many rights women had won. In May 1991, a compromised version of the Shariat Bill was adopted, but the debate over whether civil law or Islamic law should prevail in the country continued in the early 1990s.

Discourse about the position of women in Islam and women's role in a modern Islamic state was sparked by the government's attempts to formalize a specific interpretation of Islamic law. Although the issue of evidence became central to the concern for women's legal status, more mundane matters such as mandatory dress codes for women and whether females could compete in international sports competitions were also being argued.

Another challenge faced by the Pakistani women concerns their integration into the labour force. Because of economic pressures and the dissolution of extended families in urban areas, many more women are working for wages than in the past. But by 1990 females officially made up only 13 percent of the labour force. Restrictions on their mobility limit their opportunities, and traditional notions of propriety lead families to conceal the extent of work performed by women. Usually, only the poorest women engage in work — often as midwives, sweepers, or nannies — for compensation outside the home. More often, poor urban women remain at home and sell manufactured goods to a middleman for compensation. More and more urban women have engaged in such activities during the 1990s, although to avoid being shamed few families willingly admit that women contribute to the family economically. Hence, there is little information about the work women do. On the basis of the predominant fiction that most women do no work other than their domestic chores, the government has been hesitant to adopt overt policies to increase women's employment options and to provide legal support for women's labour force participation.


The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) commissioned a national study in 1992 on women's economic activity to enable policy planners and donor agencies to cut through the existing myths on female labour force participation. The study addresses the specific reasons that the assessment of women's work in Pakistan is filled with discrepancies and under enumeration and provides a comprehensive discussion of the range of informal sector work performed by women throughout the country. Information from this study was also incorporated into the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1993-98).

A melding of the traditional social welfare activities of the women's movement and its newly revised political activism appears to have occurred. Diverse groups, including the Women's Action Forum, the All-Pakistan Women's Association, the Pakistan Women Lawyers' Association, and the Business and Professional Women's Association, are supporting small-scale projects throughout the country that focus on empowering women. They have been involved in such activities as instituting legal aid for indigent women, opposing the gendered segregation of universities, and publicizing and condemning the growing incidents of violence against women. The Pakistan Women Lawyers' Association has released a series of films educating women about their legal rights; the Business and Professional Women's Association is supporting a comprehensive project in Yakki Gate, a locality of the poor inside the Walled City of Lahore; and the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi has promoted networks among women who work at home so they need not be dependent on middlemen to acquire raw materials and market the clothes they produce.

The women's movement has shifted from reacting to government legislation to focusing on three primary goals: securing women's political representation in the National Assembly; working to raise women's consciousness, particularly about family planning; and countering suppression of women's rights by defining and articulating positions on events as they occur in order to create more public awareness.

Though in 2006, the Pakistani parliament passed the Women's Protection Bill, repealing some of the Hudood Ordinances, besides approving reservation of 10 percent quota for women in the Central Superior Services (CSS) examination and establishing women welfare ministry yet there was a long way to go. Now during the present PPP regime, President Asif Ali Zardari signed the 'Protection against Harassment of Women at Workplace Bill 2009' and 'Protection against Domestic Violence Bill 2009' which the parliament adopted in 2010. Still hundreds of thousands women are deprived of their basic rights and a long way to go in emancipation of women in Pakistan. Some of these recommendations can be fruitful in changing and improving women lives.

Without progress of women our country cannot be developed. We must realize that women constitute half of the population and keeping 50 percent population backward how can the entire community progress. Thus they should be given full rights and complete freedom.

Women have a great potential, talent and intelligence which can be used in right direction by giving them equal opportunities in jobs. This talent and intelligence has to be nurtured to improve the status of women in the world.

Men and women have different strengths and weakness, so playing off one another can make for a better workplace.

Women should also be treated as human beings and they should be granted equal rights like men. Thus if democratic and human rights culture develops in the country, intra-religious differences can also be minimized and peaceful coexistence can become possible. This can be further ensured with modern education particularly for women and rational outlook.
To provide an encouraging environment for women development we have to ensure economic empowerment, security, equal rights, opportunities, implementation of current legislation and initiating further legislations, soft loans and skill development of women.
There is a great need to provide liberty, individuality and dignity to women given them by the Holy Quran and our rhetoric should match our practice.



To provide an encouraging environment for women development we have to ensure economic empowerment, security, equal rights, opportunities, implementation of current legislation and initiating further legislations, soft loans and skill development of women.

The participation of women in economic activities should be improved because it can help companies diversify and enhance corporate performance,

Women should be treated equally and should have same job opportunities as that of men.

Women should get higher reservations in government offices and parliament so that their problems can be heard at central level.

There should be very strict norms that should be taken against those people who commit discrimination against women.

Media should come up with significant strategy to create awareness regarding women's rights.

Policies of the government and laws should protect the rights of women.

These recommendations can bring positive and constructive change in the plight of women from individual to structural level.

Source: JWT