Pakistan Ranks Last in Global Gender Gap Report 2025
The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report for 2025 has placed Pakistan at the very bottom of its rankings, occupying the 148th position out of 148 countries assessed. This stark placement highlights the profound and persistent challenges facing women's equality and participation across all sectors of Pakistani society.
Structural Barriers Constrain Women's Digital Economy Participation
Women's engagement in Pakistan's burgeoning digital economy remains severely hampered by a complex web of structural obstacles. These include widespread digital illiteracy, significant limitations in both access to and affordability of technology, serious safety and mobility concerns, and deeply rooted socio-cultural norms that restrict female participation. According to analyses from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), social norms and inherent biases play a decisive role in shaping who participates in the digital world.
In the Pakistani context, these constraints operate simultaneously and synergistically. They do not merely restrict basic access to the internet and devices; they also severely curtail opportunities for skills development, economic advancement, and personal agency. This multifaceted challenge necessitates integrated and comprehensive policy responses that span connectivity infrastructure, educational reform, and labour market interventions.
Social Media: A Double-Edged Sword for Women
While social media platforms in Pakistan have enabled new forms of communication and community, they have increasingly been weaponized as tools to discipline and control women's presence in public life. Digital platforms are amplifying systemic misogyny through coordinated trolling campaigns, sexualised abuse, and the deliberate spread of disinformation. This reinforces patriarchal norms and actively limits women's participation in the digital public sphere, with journalists, politicians, and content creators facing particularly intense targeting.
Online gender-based violence (GBV) is now a widespread phenomenon. Data from the Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan indicates that 38% of women globally experience online abuse directly, while a staggering 85% witness it happening to others. This abuse manifests in various forms, from misogynistic slurs and harassment to more severe tactics like doxxing and the distribution of non-consensual imagery, collectively categorized as Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV).
Weak Frameworks and Cultural Norms Enable Abuse
In Pakistan, this violence persists due to a combination of weak regulatory frameworks, pervasive victim-blaming social norms, and significant gaps in law enforcement. Furthermore, misinterpreted religious narratives are often invoked to intensify discrimination and marginalization, affecting women in both digital and physical public spaces.
The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) clearly establish that companies have a responsibility to prevent and address human rights harms, which explicitly includes TFGBV. It is critical to recognize that online abuse is not merely a social nuisance; it constitutes a serious human rights violation that systematically silences women's voices and restricts their fundamental civic participation.
The Rise of Digital Patriarchy and Coordinated Harassment
Over the past decade, rising political polarization in Pakistan has correlated with an intensification of gendered online violence. Women journalists and politicians are disproportionately targeted with sexualised abuse, violent threats, and orchestrated disinformation campaigns. Weak content moderation systems, especially for local languages like Urdu and Punjabi, allow this abuse to proliferate largely unchecked.
Online discourse frequently devolves into moral judgement, policing women's bodies, clothing, and personal lives rather than engaging with their professional work or ideas. This reflects a broader pattern where digital platforms are exploited to enforce traditional gender hierarchies and delegitimize women's rightful presence in public discourse. This phenomenon, termed digital patriarchy, mirrors offline systems of control and demonstrates that technology is not neutral.
Platform Design Amplifies Harm
Platform features such as user anonymity, mechanisms for virality, and algorithmic amplification enable networked misogyny to operate at an unprecedented scale. Gendered disinformation and smear campaigns are deliberately deployed to distort public perception and systematically undermine women's credibility and authority.
Digital spaces were once heralded as tools for expanding inclusion by overcoming offline barriers. Instead, they have become increasingly hostile environments where visibility for women often invites punishment. Coordinated harassment campaigns function as deliberate tools to silence dissenting female voices and reinforce male-dominated narratives. The underlying message is clear: women who dare to speak publicly will face intense scrutiny, policing, and abuse.
TFGBV is Not Inevitable: It's a Design and Governance Failure
Critically, Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence is not an inevitable byproduct of technology. It is actively shaped by platform design choices and profound governance failures. Algorithms that prioritize engagement often reward outrage and sensationalism, thereby amplifying harmful content over credible, constructive discourse. The lack of robust moderation for local languages creates safe havens for abuse.
Simultaneously, anonymity and a pervasive sense of impunity embolden perpetrators, while organised political and social actors exploit platform tools to scale harassment efficiently. These digital dynamics are powerfully reinforced by Pakistan's patriarchal social context, where offline norms controlling women's voices and mobility seamlessly migrate online. Together, they create a toxic ecosystem where misogyny is normalized rather than challenged.
The Complication of Internalised Misogyny
The landscape is further complicated by the presence of internalised misogyny. Women themselves may consciously or unconsciously participate in reinforcing patriarchal norms by engaging in moral policing, victim-blaming, or even amplifying abusive narratives against other women. This reflects the deep social conditioning embedded within patriarchal systems. While it does not negate structural inequality, it underscores how profoundly these norms are internalized, indicating that solutions must be not only technological or regulatory but also deeply cultural and educational.
Case Study: The Smear Campaign Against Gharida Farooqi
The recent coordinated smear campaign against prominent journalist Gharida Farooqi during the Islamabad talks of 2026 starkly illustrates these dynamics. Instead of engaging with the substance of her reporting, online discourse fixated on her appearance. Morphed, non-consensual, and AI-manipulated images were widely circulated with the intent to shame and discredit her professionally. Her clothing was repeatedly framed as indecent or provocative, reinforcing the patriarchal idea that women in public spaces must conform to specific moral and sartorial expectations.
Such campaigns follow a familiar pattern across the political spectrum, where trolling, body shaming, and sexualised abuse are weaponized to delegitimize women. These harmful narratives are often amplified through viral content, memes, and coordinated online networks, normalizing the scrutiny and judgement of women's bodies as acceptable public discourse. Notably, both men and women frequently participate in these campaigns, reinforcing patriarchal standards that ultimately constrain all women.
A Powerful Disciplinary Mechanism with Broader Consequences
This convergence of harassment, moral policing, and internalised misogyny creates a powerful disciplinary mechanism. It not only targets individual women but also sends a chilling signal to others that public participation comes at the high cost of constant surveillance, harsh judgement, and potential abuse. Digital platforms thus play a dual and damaging role: they host and amplify misogyny while enabling its monetization and virality through engagement-driven algorithms. Smear campaigns can become profitable, normalizing abuse as both entertainment and political strategy.
These dynamics contribute to broader social regression by legitimizing victim-blaming attitudes and reinforcing regressive gender norms. If digital spaces are ever to fulfil their original promise of fostering greater inclusion and democratic participation, urgent and meaningful accountability is required from multiple stakeholders. This includes technology platforms, policymakers, and society at large. Addressing the scourge of digital patriarchy demands stronger and more effective regulation, genuine platform responsibility, and sustained cultural change to dismantle the structures that enable TFGBV and systematically silence women's voices in Pakistan.
