Bargaining in the Dark: How Women Survive a Man’s Country, and How It Can Change.

Bargaining in the Dark: How Women Survive a Man’s Country, and How It Can Change

Maud Jaam

Readers’ — observations on Pakistani society

Sunday, October 18, 2026 Opinion & Society

Society · Women

Bargaining in the Dark: How Women Survive a Man’s Country, and How It Can Change

A woman in Pakistan can sit in a lecture hall and still not be allowed to take a job. That is not a contradiction. It is the whole story.

By Sumair Ahmed Mahar Readers’ · October 2026
Scales of justice weighing the male symbol against the female symbol

Chart

Fewer than three in ten women are in Pakistan’s labour force

Share of each group, Global Gender Gap Report 2026

59.5%

Overall gap closedThird from the bottom among all countries ranked.

28.2%

WomenAbout 28 of every 100 women are in the labour force.

81.5%

MenAbout 81 of every 100 men are in the labour force.

Source: World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2026, as reported by Dawn (17 September 2026). The coloured part of each ring is that group’s own share. The three rings are separate measures, not parts of one whole.

In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2026, Pakistan finished third from the bottom, with 59.5 percent of its gender gap closed. It scored lowest among the 38 lower-middle-income economies and the seven South Asian countries in the index. The ranking tells only half the story, because the score is built unevenly.

In education, the picture looks better. Tertiary enrolment is almost equal for the two sexes, at 10.71 percent of women and 11.01 percent of men. Pakistan ranks first in the world on that parity measure. But read the figure again. Parity is not abundance. Barely one in ten young people of either sex reaches university, and women’s literacy still trails men’s by a wide margin. A girl who gets that far has already beaten the odds, and then the economy closes the door on her.

The same report notes that women lack equal inheritance rights as widows and daughters, and have unequal rights in divorce. A country can fill a few classrooms with girls and still keep the market, the courtroom and the family property half shut.

How women actually survive

We tend to picture a woman in a patriarchal society as someone who only endures. The research is more complicated, and more respectful of her.

Dr Nadia Agha, a sociologist, spent the summer of 2012 in six villages of Khairpur, Sindh. She conducted 30 in-depth interviews and three focus groups with married women aged 15 to 30. Her central finding is uncomfortable. The things these women do to be accepted, such as doing household work well, bearing children and earning a little extra from craft work, look like proof of subordination. But they are also deliberate survival strategies, because accommodation is what wins approval.

“She is not only obeying. She is bargaining, with the only currency the system lets her hold.”

Agha also ties patriarchy tightly to poverty. In her reading, the customs that keep women subordinate are designed to counter social insecurity. A family with no land, no savings and no safety net protects itself through control: of marriages, of movement, of a daughter’s “honour”. The cruelty is that the bargain reproduces itself. In her later book on the subject, she argues that women internalise the culture of their own subordination and, in old age, exercise power over younger women. Every mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law.

One caution is due. Her fieldwork covers a single district, and she is describing young married women in rural Sindh, not every woman in Pakistan. But it is the most careful account I found of how the bargain works at home, and it should change how we talk about blame. This is not only men against women. It is a system that recruits everyone inside it.

What can change it

Money that a woman controls. Pakistan’s Benazir Income Support Programme sends unconditional cash directly to poor women. An evaluation covering two, five and eight years of the programme found no significant empowerment effect after two years. After five and eight years, the effect on women’s mobility, decision-making and voting was substantial, while the effect on husbands’ attitudes and on violence against women was only mild. Not every study agrees. A separate Macquarie University thesis found more joint decisions and more economic activity among recipient women, but no significant gain in mobility. The honest summary is that change comes slowly, and it reaches the visible things before the deep ones.

There is one more finding worth keeping. A PIDE study followed 2,333 women in Layyah who lost their BISP eligibility. One year later, it found no increase in intimate partner violence and no loss of decision-making power or mobility. The authors suggest that households may keep what they have learned about a woman’s role with money. One year is a short window, and the study covers a single district, so it suggests rather than proves. But it answers one common fear, that empowering women only invites a backlash.

A bridge from the classroom to work. If tertiary enrolment is already near parity, the next reform is not another school. It is safe transport, workplaces that take harassment seriously, and a family’s permission, which is the hardest of the three to legislate.

Law that reaches the village. Equal inheritance and divorce rights mean little if a girl cannot reach a court. Rights become real only when someone enforces them in a village in Sindh, not only in Islamabad.

Security for the household. If patriarchy feeds on insecurity, then jobs, land titles and social protection are feminist policies, even when nobody calls them that.

Men, and mothers-in-law, at the table. Reform that speaks only to young women asks the least powerful people in the house to change the whole house. Change has to reach the fathers, the brothers and the older women who guard the rules.

The honest conclusion

Pakistan’s women are not waiting to be rescued. They are negotiating, every day, inside a system built to make negotiation look like obedience. Our job is not to give them a voice. They already have one. Our job is to stop making them whisper. ■

Sumair Ahmed Mahar

Sumair Ahmed Mahar is a student, writer and self-publisher from Sindh, and the editor of Readers’. His writing focuses on Pakistani society, human rights.

Notes and sources

  1. WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2026, as reported by Dawn (17 Sept 2026): third-to-last, 59.5% parity, labour-force participation of 28.21% (women) and 81.46% (men), 144th in economic participation. dawn.com/news/2030632
  2. The Express Tribune (18 Sept and 8 Oct 2026): education parity of 91.7%, first on tertiary enrolment parity, economic participation score of 36.4%. tribune.com.pk/story/2629953
  3. Tertiary figures (10.71% women, 11.01% men), inheritance and divorce findings, via Asia News Network. asianews.network/?p=301997
  4. Nadia Agha, Women Bargaining with Patriarchy in Rural Pakistan: A Case Study of Khairpur, Sindh, PhD thesis, University of York (2015). etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10710. Fieldwork details: ISA dissertation abstract
  5. Nadia Agha, Kinship, Patriarchal Structure and Women’s Bargaining with Patriarchy in Rural Sindh, Pakistan, Springer (2021). The point on women reproducing subordination comes from the publisher’s description. springer.com
  6. Iqbal, Farooq and Padda (2021), Can Empowerment be Enhanced by Putting Cash in the Hands of Poor Women? European Journal of Development Research 33(3). One co-author works at BISP. ideas.repec.org
  7. Asma Kashif, Macquarie University MRes thesis (2022). figshare.mq.edu.au
  8. PIDE study on women exiting BISP in Layyah (2,333 women, one-year follow-up): The News, 20 Mar 2026; World Bank Reproducible Research Repository
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