Classism - the other face of patriarchy

Calling oneself an intersectional feminist is fashionable, even delicious, today. But intersectionality was never meant to be a label; it requires inspecting power, including one's own. How many times such "misadventures" are missed in our feminist activism, I have not counted. As the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence return (25 November to 10 December 2026), one question keeps circling in my mind: how much of the inequality attributed to patriarchy is also sustained by class privilege and patronage?

Academics, advocates and activists working on gender equality rarely dare to question what class means for their own institutions, movements and professional relationships. Pakistan needs a more candid structural feminist critique of this convenient omission. I understand that asking has a cost; disruption always does. I have been asking since the early 1990s, when I encountered Prof Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on intersectionality.

I have not forgotten what happened when I began teaching gender as visiting faculty at public and private universities more than two decades ago, and when I established AGEHI (Advocates of Gender, Education & Health Information) to demystify gender in Pakistani contexts. AGEHI is also the Urdu word, meaning awareness, knowledge or consciousness. In both spaces, I brought class in rather than reducing gender relations to men versus women. I was diminished and dismissed, and not by ordinary adversaries but by established, elite feminists in academia and activism. I continue to pay a heavy price, and I am glad I persist as a disrupter in its true sense. This piece is not a bid for sympathy or an inventory of grievances. It is an attempt to put on record some inconvenient facets of our feminism.

In Pakistan, class is not simply about income or property. It travels through surnames, biradari, qabila, domicile, accent, degrees, family connections and proximity to influential people. These become informal qualifications, sometimes counting for more than competence. A politically correct surname can do wonders. The right sponsor makes a debatable appointment look decent.

Patriarchy profits from this. A woman's authority is often judged by things unrelated to her work: marital status, family background, social circle, even appearance. She may be qualified and experienced yet expected to prove her acceptability before exercising authority. And if she lacks the right surname, contacts or PR machinery? Dak-khana milta na ho tou, shashka bhi na ho tou? (If she doesn't fit in with the right circle, and isn't even eye candy?) Where does she stand in a system that values social currency over professional substance?

The same fault lines run through donors, diplomats and development actors, who routinely engage with influential surnames and people who get things done through connections. There is operational convenience in this. But what does a donor gain by hiring someone from a marginalised background with no network to smooth the work? Where is the incentive to redistribute access rather than keep negotiating with those who already hold it?

Sometimes the opposite happens: the visibly oppressed are selected for their optics, becoming faces of inclusion and photographs in reports. Visibility is not authority, and representation is not redistribution. Who decides, who controls resources and who receives professional recognition remain separate questions.

The middle class complicates this conversation. Some of us hold professional qualifications, foreign degrees and years of experience in teaching, policy and development. We appear advantaged, and in some respects we are. But we may lack the domicile, connections, sponsors and social acceptability that make privilege count in Pakistan. Class is not simply a line between rich and poor; it is also about who can convert education and experience into recognition and authority.

Nor are the women who do hold that authority necessarily allies. I contest the conjecture that women who have experienced patriarchy automatically become more egalitarian. A woman can challenge male domination and still produce class pyramids, speaking of solidarity while belittling another woman's accent, background or credentials, or championing women's leadership while favouring familiar circles. Many of us have faced not only misogynist men but also women with internalised misogyny, who enjoy every perk and privilege of the system and have never stood with women who are their equals, or even their superiors, in qualification.

Sanitised, donor-approved feminist language does not make the exercise of power feminist; nor does the presence of a woman in a senior position necessarily mean that the hierarchy itself has changed. In Pakistan's civil society and social development sector (many call it business), this gap between language and practice is especially visible.

Organisations advocating gender justice usually have elite boards, opaque recruitment and patronage-based appointments. Women's labour sustains programmes and campaigns while recognition goes elsewhere. Those who question these arrangements risk being labelled difficult or bitter. Empowerment, it seems, is welcome as long as it leaves the distribution of power undisturbed.

Professional exclusion is not the same as the deprivation and violence faced by women living in poverty. Nor does every privileged woman or donor behave alike. The question is why class so often remains outside gender analysis.

Pakistan needs "honest" research (though I wonder how it would be possible) into how class, gender, age, ethnicity and marital status intersect in professional environments. Sex-disaggregated data is a starting point. The harder questions are who gets appointed, whose work is recognised, who holds authority and who receives institutional protection. Donors and development partners should examine their own recruitment, funding and partnership practices rather than rely on familiar elites as intermediaries for inclusion.

The 16 Days should invite scrutiny beyond the vocabulary of empowerment. Who gets into the room, and who decides? Classism is not a side effect of patriarchy; it is one of the ways patriarchy perpetuates its own hierarchies, sometimes with women as gatekeepers and development actors as willing facilitators.

Challenging unequal power while remaining comfortable with the privileges that sustain it is not feminism. And those of us who say so will keep being called, in Kishwar Naheed's phrase, hum gunahgar aurtain.