In 1996, I was writing a weekly Urdu science column on science and technology for the youth page of Jang in Rawalpindi. Nobody else was doing it. Information Superhighway was a phrase most Pakistanis had never heard. Cyberspace was a concept more than a destination. We were getting our first encounters with dial-up connections, learning to navigate early search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo, when the line held long enough. No Google, no AI drafting our sentences, no option to look something up in thirty seconds.
You read. You researched. You wrote.
That same year, I was also hosting a live morning current affairs programme and the daily morning transmission on PTV as its first solo female anchor, speaking extempore, no teleprompters, speaking to a national audience about where the world was heading technically, and why Pakistan needed to be in that conversation. That was a generation ago.
It is Women’s Day, March 2026. I am still making the same arguments.
What I am not, at fifty-something, is patient. Because I have been making the same arguments for thirty years. The vocabulary has upgraded as we moved from bulletin boards to broadband to AI. The frameworks have multiplied. The gender action plans have thickened. And the situation of women in Pakistan’s science, technology and innovation systems has moved at a pace that, if sustained, will achieve parity in 2077. My grandchildren will be old.
Let me start with a name: Dr Mehwish Hasnain. A doctor at the District Headquarter Hospital in Kohat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. She asked a male visitor to leave the female ward. Basic patient safety—the kind of thing any of us would do without thinking.
She was shot dead on the way home.
She was travelling by rickshaw. Because that is what doctors in Pakistan earn. Not enough for a car. Not enough for safe transport after a shift. Pay scales for doctors were insultingly low when I was in clinical medicine, and they have not become dignified since. I know this from the inside. Before I moved from clinical medicine to public health—a transition shaped by circumstances I had not chosen—I too travelled widely by public transport. Same roads. Same exposure. Different outcome. Same system.
Her offence was enforcing a rule to protect her female patients. There was outrage. A news cycle. The Young Doctors Association struck. And then, as always, the noise faded.
I am not telling you this to provoke. I am telling you because it is a policy failure, a pay failure, and a safety failure in the same sentence. If your national science and innovation framework does not include a legally enforceable guarantee of physical safety for women professionals, or any serious reckoning with what we pay the doctors keeping those institutions running, it is not a gender-responsive policy. It is an embellishment.
Thirty years of sector knowledge, networks, and hard-won expertise are being discarded at precisely the moment they are most valuable
Now let me tell you something quieter. No gunshots. Just a slow strangulation of ambition.
I have been documenting women entrepreneurs in Pakistan. In February 2026, I published research on something I had not seen formally named. I call it digital hostage-taking. A woman pays to build her business website. She does not own it. The developer registered the domain in their name. No login, no admin access, no control. When she asks for her credentials, she is threatened. Change developer, lose the site. Years of content, client relationships, and professional identity gone. Completely legal. Completely invisible to any national policy framework I have reviewed.
I also named a wider pattern: EOBD—Ease of Business Doing. Or, as I have come to think of it: Educated but Obstructed from Business Development. These are women who can enter business but cannot scale it. I ran an informal survey, Pakistan-wide, among educated urban women entrepreneurs.
One question: how easy, on a scale of one to ten (one is the hardest), is it to do business as a woman in Pakistan? Not a single woman rated it above five. When I asked men to estimate women’s experience, the most optimistic gave a seven. That gap is not a data point. It is a denunciation. Our systems are designed within a patriarchal framework, so it is hardly surprising that their architects remain oblivious to the obstacles women face every day.
Here is something else nobody says. Women are the backbone of Pakistan’s STEM education system. Every science teacher I had growing up—math, chemistry, physics, and biology—was a woman. Every single one of them.
Globally, women are 57 per cent of secondary school teachers. They built the intellectual foundation on which every scientist in this country is standing. And they are paid accordingly: in half the world’s countries, teachers earn less than other professions requiring the same qualification level. The same pay problem that put Dr Mehwish on a rickshaw.
The pipeline is not broken at the entry. It is broken in recognition, promotion, and pay.
One more bias nobody names: ageism. I started raising it in conversations and podcasts a decade ago, when even women in the elite development sector dismissed it as little more than an English word. I am a woman over fifty. I say that without apology—it is a credential, not a confession. In the innovation economy, ageism starts at 36 for women.
After 45, funding falls sharply. After 50, we become statistically invisible to investors, despite the fact that the average age of a successful start-up founder is 45. Thirty years of sector knowledge, networks, and hard-won expertise are being discarded at precisely the moment they are most valuable.
I was explaining the Information Superhighway on the state-owned conservative national television (PTV) before most of the investors now funding twenty-five-year-olds were born. Female. Over fifty. Pakistani. Three reasons to be written off. I am still here.
I am not here to play resilience. Resilience is what women do when systems refuse to change. I have been performing it even before 1996. I am done celebrating it as a virtue.
I am asking for four concrete things: legally enforce safe working environments for women in every science, technology, and innovation (STI) institution—not aspirationally, with actual penalties; create digital asset protection laws so women own what they build online; produce annual, public, gender-disaggregated data across STI on pay, patents, promotion, and funding; and put women at every table where decisions are made, not as tokens but as principals.
I am not asking for sympathy. I am asking for systems. I was asking for the same thing in 1996, in Urdu, before most people had heard the word “internet.” I will keep asking.
Gender integration in science, technology, and innovation is not a women’s issue. It is Pakistan’s most underutilised development strategy. I have been saying so since before you could Google it.