ISLAMABAD: Pakistani women rights activists called for a change in mindset in the country on Wednesday after Pakistan was ranked the second-worst country in the world for gender parity in the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2022.
The top five countries in the report, featuring a list of 146 countries, were Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand and Sweden. Pakistan occupied number 145 on the list, the second-worst. The only country that performed worse than Pakistan was Afghanistan.
The report also said Pakistan was among five countries with a gender gap greater than 5 percent, with the others being Qatar, Azerbaijan, China and India.
In the Economic Participation and Opportunity subindex, the report said women in Pakistan had the smallest share of senior, managerial and legislative roles at 4.5 percent.
“Until we as a nation don’t change the perception that women’s only purpose in life should be staying within the four walls of their homes, go out only when allowed by the men of the family, get married and bear and rear [their] children, the status of women will not change,” Tasneem Ahmar, the founder of the women’s rights advocacy group Uks, told Arab News, responding to the latest survey.
“In Pakistan, institutions are male-dominated where there exists a patriarchal bias,” Farzana Bari, a prominent human rights activist and academic, told Arab News. “They don’t let competent women rise to the top positions,” she said, adding that men acting as “gatekeepers” in various institutions kept women from achieving positions higher than Grade 18 or 19.
Bari cited the examples of Pakistan’s health and education sectors.
“Women run the education and health sectors but how many women DGs or secretaries in health do you see?” she asked.
Speaking about the report in general, Bari said such indexes did not take into account Pakistan’s ground realities, such as conflicts that kept women away from the workforce or issues specific to women of this region. She said another problem was that such indexes did not take into consideration the informal sector, which had witnessed the entry of many women and children after the coronavirus pandemic.
The WEF report said Pakistan had registered a significant improvement across three sub-indexes, with the highest positive variation on Economic Participation and Opportunity.
Pakistan has a population of 107 million women and in 2022 had closed 56.4% of the gender gap that affected them.
“This is the highest overall level of parity Pakistan has posted since the report launched,” the report said. “While wage equality carries the highest gender gap score among economic indicators (0.620), advances were also reported in estimated earned income, where women’s earnings increased 4% compared to 2021.”
The report said South Asia had one of the lowest regional gender parity scores for Health and Survival, at 94.2%, with Afghanistan, Pakistan and India among the worst-performing countries in this category globally.
