Pakistan’s Gender Gap: A Public Health Reckoning
Pakistan’s Gender Gap: A Public Health Reckoning by Fizza Javed and Noor Ul-Ain Shah Introduction: Inequality as Illness Pakistan’s fall to the very bottom of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (2025) is not just a disturbing statistic but a public health emergency. Women’s participation in the economy is stagnating, and education and healthcare are chronically underfunded. All while systemic violence is being left unchecked. Gender inequality in Pakistan is more than a social injustice; it is a health crisis. Exclusion from education, work, and decision-making translates into higher maternal deaths, chronic undernutrition, and untreated illness. This means worsening mental health for millions of women and girls. Pakistan’s consistently low performance in global gender rankings reflects structural inequities that demand urgent, multisectoral intervention (Ali et al., 2017). Without it, women remain trapped in cycles of poverty, violence, and ill health, and the nation ...