Pakistan needs to double its efforts for women's empowerment as its gender ranking remains poor

Islamabad [Pakistan]: The Pakistan government needs to double its effort for women's empowerment as the country's ranking on gender equality remains to be poor, indicating deep-seated patriarchy in the society that ensures persistent structural discrimination, according to a media report.

Pakistan must become the lead proponent for improved ranking methodologies that can account for the experience of developing countries beyond their geographic region and income levels, by including population size, or violent conflict that keep countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq etc at a constant disadvantage, reported The News International.

Creating a Pakistan-specific Gender Equality and Empowerment Index based on its unique pathway, it can illustrate the case of South Asia.

To achieve this, the government should allocate more resources for gender data and policy implementation, and value its partnership with civil society.

By taking a lead advocacy role internationally not only would Pakistan do itself a favour but it will also contribute significantly to the case of the developing world, said the Pakistani publication.

In the developing world, the development processes are different and to demonstrate this, Pakistan must develop its own gender equality indices that encapsulate its unique path to gender empowerment.

As Pakistan's improved gender parity in higher education and the civil service should be recognised and the decrease in violence against women should be noted.

Pakistan needs to generate new data where needed, supplement partially available data and utilise its extensive administrative data fully, and standardise all data to improve its ranking.

According to The News International, Pakistan's sustainable development goal machinery must undertake more advocacy at the UN SDGs Secretariat for valuing improvements in Tier 2 indicators with a note to indicate progress.

And, indicators with partial data availability be reconfigured in phases, starting with basic statistics and moving to more complex coverage in a predetermined time frame. This is critical as 71 per cent Tier 2 indicators in Goal 5 are omitted from the ranking. (ANI)