#BalanceforBetter

All across the world, International Women’s Day is marked on March 8. This year the theme is #BalanceforBetter. The idea is for us to build a gender-balanced world where everyone has a part to play - all the time, everywhere.

Balance is not a women’s issue. The race is on for the gender-balanced boardroom, a gender-balanced government, gender-balanced media coverage, a gender-balance of employees, more gender-balance in wealth, etc. It goes without saying that gender balance is essential for economies and communities to thrive.

The campaign theme provides a unified direction to guide and galvanise continuous collective action, with #BalanceforBetter activity reinforced and amplified all year.

Now let us look at where we stand. In 2018, the United Nations released a report on gender equality for its Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 with Pakistan being one of the main four countries in focus. The report identifies inequality among women and girls and paints a sorry picture for the country.

Using data from a UN Demographic and Health Surveys 2012-2013, the report takes into account variables such as wealth, location and ethnicity. It reveals that 12 per cent of women in Pakistan (4.9 million) aged 18-49 are simultaneously deprived in four Sustainable Development Goals-related dimensions: Child marriages, education, healthcare, and employment.

The data highlights that women from marginalised ethnic groups living in poor rural households fare worse across a variety of well-being and empowerment. The most disadvantaged ethnic group oscillates between Sindhi, Saraiki and Pashtun.

79.8 per cent of the women in Pakistan lack access to clean cooking fuel while a quarter is deprived of sanitation services with seven per cent living more than 30 minutes from the closest water source.

The largest disparity is in education. 98.8 per cent of the women belonging to rural background and 29.3 per cent belonging to the richest urban dwellers lack access to education. In total 74 per cent have an average of less than six years of education. Poor, rural Pashtun women are the most disadvantaged in literacy.

In another report released the same year, Pakistan was seen as the second worst country in the world in terms of gender parity, ranking 148 out of 149 countries in the ‘Global Gender Gap Index 2018’ report released by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

According to the report, four Muslim countries — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Pakistan — are the four worst-performers in the world where the number of women holding managerial positions is the lowest.

Categorised as the lowest-ranked country in South Asia, Pakistan closed 55 per cent of its overall gender gap as compared to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka which were the top-ranked countries in the region, having closed just over 72pc and nearly 68pc of their overall gender gap, respectively.

The Geneva-based organisation’s annual report tracked disparities between the genders in 149 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.

Pakistan’s scorecard showed that in terms of economic participation and opportunity, it ranked 146th, while in health and survival, its rank was 145.

In terms of political empowerment, the country was positioned at 97. Pakistan’s population was growing at the rate of 1.93pc per annum, the report pointed out.

Report indicates it will take centuries to achieve gender parity in workplaces around the globe. Some good news is that Pakistan made some good progress in 2018 in wage equality as well as on the educational attainment sub-index. However, this progress was insufficiently rapid to avoid the country being overtaken by a number of faster-improving countries at the lower end of the index’s global rankings.

Women were significantly under-represented in growing areas of employment that require science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills. There is particularly low participation of women within the artificial intelligence field, where they made up just 22pc of the workforce. From a low base, South Asia had made the fastest progress on closing its gender gap of any world region over the past decade. In terms of year-on-year progress, out of the seven countries from the region covered by the index this year, four countries increased their overall scores compared to last year, while three had decreased their overall scores. We need to fast track gender parity in Pakistan if we are to compete internationally. It is a challenge worth taking.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2019.

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