Lack of skills, limited opportunities in the job market and social and cultural restrictions limit women’s chances to compete for resources in the public arena. This situation has led to the social and economic dependency of women that becomes the basis for male power over women in all social relationships.

However, the spread of patriarchy is not even. The nature and degree of women’s oppression / subordination vary across classes, regions, and the rural / urban divide.

Patriarchal structures are relatively stronger in the rural and tribal setting where local customs establish male authority and power over women’s lives. Women are exchanged, sold, and bought in marriages. They are given limited opportunities to create choices for themselves in order to change the realities of their lives.

On the other hand, women belonging to the upper and middle classes have increasingly greater access to education and employment opportunities and can assume greater control over their lives.

The most powerful aspect of social and cultural context is the internalization of patriarchal norms by men and women. In learning to be a woman in the society, women internalize the patriarchal ideology and play an instrumental role in transferring and recreating the gender ideology through the process of socialization of their children. This aspect of women’s lives has been largely ignored by the development initiatives in the country.

Unfortunately Pakistan is the country where the literacy rate is very low as compared to the other developed and developing countries.  The country’s literacy rate declined from 60 percent to 58 percent, revealed the Economic Survey of Pakistan (2016-2017).

The data shows that literacy remains much higher in urban areas (74 percent) than in rural areas (49 percent) with male (81 percent) and female (68 percent) in urban areas. Province wise data suggests that Punjab and Sindh leads with 62 percent and 55 percent respectively followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with 53 percent and Balochistan with 41 percent.

Women in Pakistan participate fully in economic activities in the productive and reproductive sphere. The economic value of women’s activities in the reproductive sphere and unpaid work as a family laborer in the productive sphere has not been recognized as productive and is not accounted for in the national statistics.

Change is inevitable. We have seen many changes that have taken place in history and they continue. But the vital question here is: when will this discrimination against the “weaker sex” end, and when will we truly begin to respect women and treat them fairly and equitable?

Another illusion defeats us. It is that there is some magic in lecturing and in the hearing of recitations. We want as much time for this as possible. We begrudge taking time to work with individual pupils. Yet we know very little about the actual effectiveness of what we do. Is it not at least possible that our classroom work would be greatly increased in effectiveness if only we spent more time with our pupils as individuals?

We seem to be obsessed with teaching. We know that no one can educate another person, that all of us must educate ourselves. The role of women in development of our nation is that of a helper in this process. The question is: How can we best help?

The woman holds the secret of how to receive, feed, shelter, and give birth to life. Woman is the being destined to give life, in opposition to what the world is facing at the end of the 20th Century. Woman is a creature with an inner space to receive and protect life, to make it grow and give it to the world.