Pakistan continues to face important challenges in achieving gender equality, ranking 145th in 146 countries in the World Report on Gender Gaps (WEF). The only classified country is Sudan. On the other hand, the neighboring banglades is ranked 99th and India is 129th.
The WeF report stresses that if the world parity of the sexes in economic and political spheres has improved since the creation of the report in 2006, Pakistan is still late. The report notes: “Despite the composition of almost half of the population, the women of the Southern Asian country are faced with significant economic and social disparities”.
According to the report, only 36% of women in Pakistan participate in economic activities and only 23% are part of the workforce. More than 40 million women remain outside the active population. This reflects the low level of economic parity in Pakistan, women gaining 18% less than men. The report also explains: “For each RS1,000 that a man wins, a woman receives only RS818 for the same work.”
A World Bank report also highlights the significant gap between sexes in wages and employment opportunities. He stresses that if government and business actions are crucial, the scale and stability of these interventions remain insufficient in the face of undergoing transformations.
“Savings cannot risk late and put millions of women and girls in times of conflicts and need,” said the WEF study.
The gender wage gap is particularly striking in the agricultural sector of Pakistan, where 68% of women employed work, but 76% of them do it without salary. This contrasts with only 24% of men working without salary in the same sector.
The study also reveals the under-representation of women in leadership roles in business and industrial sectors. In management positions, only 0.14% are women, against 2.33% of men, highlighting gender inequalities deeply rooted in workplaces across Pakistan.
The WEF report also compares Pakistan in Sri Lanka, which has a highly fair professional and technical workforce (96.8%), while Pakistan has an imbalance between sexes in favor of men (35.8%).
South Asia, as a region, ranks the second lower in the level of education, with a score of 94.5%, 2.5 percentage points lower than its performance of 2023. This drop is widely attributed to lauches to trained in very populated countries such as Pakistan, which has an literacy rate of 67%, against 78%of Nepal. There are also important gaps in registration through the levels of education in Pakistan.
The WEF report calls for substantial improvement in economic parity of the sexes to ensure that women have unhindered access to resources, opportunities and decision -making positions.
“Governments are called upon to extend and strengthen the conditions of the necessary framework for companies and civil society to work together to make gender parity an economic imperative – which meets the most basic needs and inspires the very edges of innovation,” concludes the report.
