Pakistan’s standing in global women’s index comes with few surprises
Last month, Georgetown University Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Oslo’s Peace Research Institute released the first update to the Women’s Peace and Security Index that was issued two years earlier. The project, which ranks 167 countries around the world was geared toward discerning what strategies for improving women’s lives in different parts of the world are working and which others have failed. Using 11 different indicators and collating data from a variety of sources including the World Bank and the World Economic forum, the researchers tried to create a snapshot of what it is like to be a woman in the world today. Undergirding the index, is the project’s premise that security and conflict information affect women’s well-being and indicates whether they will be able to thrive.
The news for Pakistan is not particularly good. Pakistan (which had scored poorly when the index was first released in 2017) failed to improve its position. In this year’s index it ranked 164 out of 167 countries, outdoing only Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria all of which are active war zones. Scores were poor across categories from the lack of financial inclusion, legal discrimination via laws etc. employment and many others. One of the few categories where Pakistan actually improved its position was in the increased disbursement of cell phones among women but even that small gain is overshadowed by the fact that Pakistan remains the worst in the region for even that category.
Regardless of whether or not Pakistan agrees with the rankings, the reality is that the index is something that affects a nation’s stature.
Rafia Zakaria
Pakistani women also scored poorly in “financial inclusion” (although better than previously) which considers the access women have to financial institutions, credit and other means of economic empowerment. Similarly, Pakistan is the worst in South Asia in terms of the prevalence of discriminatory norms, social standards regarding what women can and cannot do and the general tolerance of crimes against women.
A slightly better performance was noted in categories such as women’s own perception of their security in their communities. Pakistan also scored better in the tabulation of war-related fatalities, not a particularly notable fact since unlike several other countries at the bottom of the index, Pakistan is not currently at war. Finally, (and somewhat surprisingly) Pakistan showed a lower prevalence of intimate partner violence than many countries in the region, ranking among the top rather than the bottom scorers in South Asia.
Of course, some consideration must be given to the fact that the ranking on that score is relative and the bottom is represented by Afghanistan which has both seen increased deaths of women owing to conflict and has long failed to prosecute or enforce any laws against domestic violence.
Obviously, when the index was inaugurated two years ago, the idea was that the presence of actual data on women was crucial in both understanding female empowerment both in terms of what was being achieved and what remained to be done.
In the words of Judith Kelly, Dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy in North Carolina, “This exercise of rating and ranking can be really powerful because countries, like human beings, think in relative terms and compare themselves with others.”
This is a valid point, but it does not address certain crucial questions posed by the rankings. First, poor countries with few resources would generally rank worse than say Sweden or Norway, even if their men were ranked relative to each other. In simple terms, it is difficult to understand which of the factors such as poverty, lack of security etc are ones that affect women disproportionately and which are the indiscriminate misfortune of both men and women born in certain countries.
Even more important is the absence of the country’s relative power internationally in affecting its rankings. Countries with poor bargaining power, whether its with the International Monetary Fund or with the World Trade Organization, effect their ability to pass down better lives and greater economic and entrepreneurial ability to their male and female citizens. This aspect of global inequity is left unattended in the index pushing the perception that the countries are competing on a level global playing field. And along these same lines, there is history, the fact that some countries are post-colonial nations whose precepts and capabilities were significantly altered by colonizing nations, which also finds no place in the discussion at all.
But despite all this, Pakistan should pay attention to the results. Regardless of whether or not Pakistan agrees with the rankings, the reality is that the index is something that affects a nation’s stature. Even more importantly, the fact that many other poor nations, several even in the same region as Pakistan (such as Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka) have scored significantly better, could point to the strategies of improving women’s lives in environments that are very similar to ours. Whether or not the WPS Index is successful in its ultimate goal of ranking countries, its tabulation of a significantly large data set is an opportunity for the government of Pakistan to attend to its most neglected constituency — the country’s women.
– Rafia Zakaria is the author of “The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan” and “Veil.” She writes regularly for The Guardian, the Boston Review, the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review and many other publications.
Twitter: @rafiazakaria
