Onus on Pakistani men to hand reins to women

When the sun rises on the 2018 International Women’s Day on March 8, Pakistan would do well to bow her head in shame. Politicians, populists, policy-makers, development consultants and the financial sectors have all collectively and individually sidelined women in the country, forcing them to the edges. Globally it may take 200 years to achieve true gender parity. For Pakistan, as things stand, this may not be enough time. Not at this rate, not with these social norms and certainly not with this lack of priority given to women’s rights.
If the recent UN report on gender equality for its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is to be believed, Pakistan is the fourth worst country in the world when it comes to the quality of women’s lives. Almost five million Pakistani women aged 18 to 45 stand deprived in terms of forced child marriages, lack of access to education and healthcare, and lack of employment opportunities. Some regions in Sindh province are worse than the most remote, war-ravaged regions of Nigeria.
In total, 74 percent of women in Pakistan have an average of less than six years of education. These are unemployable levels of education for a staggering number of women, mostly across the rural divide. Similarly in the rural areas, 70 percent of women don’t have access to healthcare or emergency medical care. Due to a significantly lower social status, women are 11 percent more food insecure than men in Pakistan. Across many households, nutrition is distributed in a way that puts young girls on the lowest rung. The man comes first and then the young boys. Also housework is so unevenly distributed that women are worn to the bone with round-the-clock care-giving.
Sometimes it seems like young girls in Pakistan are marred from birth, first by low nutrition and a lack of access to healthcare and reproductive rights, then by the absurdly low expectations of them to deliver anything but more children; preferably boys. 
There are no economic expectations of women in Pakistan, mostly because of social stigmas that bar them from entering public spaces. As a result, women are likely to wither away and become inhibited and small. Those women who dare to establish some control over their lives are chastised and punished in extreme ways, with an average of more than 1,000 honor killing cases a year reported by Human Rights Watch. Many more go unreported, hidden underneath the rugs of patriarchy. 
Inheritance laws in Pakistan are so archaic. Women only inherit a negligible fraction of their family’s land and most are pressurized to pass it on to their brothers or are married off within families to keep the wealth consolidated among men. In every case, they are distanced from financial independence and the empowerment that comes with it. 
Many laws in Pakistan are designed to punish the victims, often women who are subjugated through rape or even workplace harassment. Domestic violence is prevalent among up to 90 percent of women in Pakistan, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Law enforcement treats this as a personal family issue, often prompting women to return to their abusers.

True economic prosperity will only come by getting men to give away some of the power and privilege the country and its governance has granted them.

Aisha Sarwari

Global feminist movements like #MeToo have sprouted local movements in Pakistan that cry out against misogyny. The fashion industry has come up with the #MaiBhi campaign, asking celebrities to come forward and name their abusers so that the shame is not with them but is put on to the backs of the perpetrators. Many celebrity women have called out the sexual abuse they faced as children. For the first time in the country, women are taking charge of the narrative rather than staying silent about a crime committed against them — a crime for which justice should be sought. 
Sadly, when a woman seeks justice, first her right to speak is questioned, then her claim to being violated is discredited and eventually she is drained of the resources needed for a lifelong fight.
Fundamentally, the way abuse is rationalized in societies like Pakistan’s is through the systematic diminishing of women’s voices in public — in parliament, in the professional space and in law, technology and science.
With the advent of the internet and social media, we hope more women can have a voice. This International Women’s Day, when the agenda is to “#PushforProgress,” most Pakistani women are not allowed to have a digital presence to begin with. Of those who claw their way onto the web, 40 percent face blatant online harassment and many find themselves frightened into the four corners of their homes again.
The onus to #PushforProgress is not really on the women in Pakistan. They have a long way to go, even when the fiercest women in the world are Pakistanis. Instead the onus is on men. They need to recede and give away some of their power after checking the privilege this country and its governance has granted them for about seven decades. True economic prosperity will only come by handing the reins to women to come up with an equitable way to share power and status. There is no progress otherwise.
• Aisha Sarwari is co-founder of the Women’s Advancement Hub, a grassroots platform for women to amplify their voices. She has been working on women’s rights in Pakistan for more than 15 years. Twitter: @AishaFSarwari