No country for women

Here we go again! Another year, another depressing number.

According to the 2025 Global Gender Gap Report, Pakistan now ranks dead last: 148 out of 148 countries. Yes, rock bottom — not even crawling forward like a country that learns from its mistakes.

Last year we were 145 and before that we scraped a 'high' of 57.7% gender parity. This year it's slipped to 56.7%, a freefall with no bottom in sight. And no, that decimal point doesn't make it any less of a national embarrassment.

Peel back the report and it only gets more damning. Out of four key areas measured, Pakistan has flunked across the board.

We've crashed to 147th - a dismal 22.8% — in economic participation and opportunity. Even when educated and allowed to work, women are pushed into pigeonholes — teaching, medicine or nursing — while the rest are dumped into unpaid farming, housework, dead-end jobs or pushed out of paid work altogether.

These figures don't just speak to employment; they scream about a society that's made a sport out of keeping women from earning, learning, healing and leading.

In education, the picture isn't much brighter: we languish at 137. And that supposed 1.5% improvement in educational parity is just a statistical sleight of hand. Male enrolment tanked, so the gap only looks smaller on paper. Girls didn't race ahead; boys just fell behind, like raising your average score only because the whole class bombed.

We've deservedly earned that 131 in health and survival. Here, a woman dies every 20 minutes from preventable pregnancy complications. Seeing a female doctor in far too many villages is a miracle. Girls grow up underfed, undiagnosed and buried in chores before they even hit puberty. Toss in the daily dose of violence — the beatings, the abuse, the neglect — and what health are we talking about?

And, 118 in political empowerment limps along, held up only by reserved seats. Take those away and you'd be hard-pressed to find women in parliament at all. Only 12 women made it to the National Assembly through direct election, almost all riding on dynastic privilege. Is this representation or just inheritance by another name!? Of the 31 federal ministers, just one is a woman. But sure, let's keep paying lip service to 'empowering women'.

Behind all the grand, chest-thumping speeches and hollow empowerment promises lies a harsher truth: women in Pakistan live under constant threat.

They live with fear and insecurity stitched into their routine, navigating life like a minefield. There's occupational segregation and harassment at work, honour killings and domestic abuse at home, cyberbullying online, tokenism in politics, legal neglect in courts and social backlash everywhere in between.

Sure, we could nitpick the report. Why isn't Afghanistan ranked? How are countries like Yemen and Sudan, both ravaged by conflict, ahead of us? Fair questions. But even if we claw our way up three or four spots, what exactly would we be celebrating? Is 145th or 144th place any better than 148th?

Let's stop mistaking a few elite women for proof of real progress. They're the exception, not the evidence. It's like pointing to a VIP lounge and calling it public transport.

Let's stop clapping for symbolic wins while most Pakistani women are crushed by a system that refuses to protect and often actively punishes them.

Until we stop shrugging at honour killings, until we start prosecuting rapists without blaming victims, until we make sure women can go to school, to work, to the doctor, to court, to parliament — safely, equally and with dignity — we're not a society in progress.

We're just a headline: updated annually, ignored daily. Until that changes, all talk of gender parity is just unwalkable talk.