Locations
Where Power Sits
By Van Nguyen | Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP Pakistan
The deeper question is not simply how many women are in positions of power. It is what they are able to do once they get there, and whether their presence changes the quality of decisions being made.
During Pakistan’s 2024 general election, I spent some time observing a polling centre.
What stayed with me was not the mechanics of voting. It was the people coming in and out, and the quiet reminder that democracy begins with a simple act: choosing who gets to speak for you.
I found myself wondering what it must feel like for an 18-year-old woman voting for the first time. She has imagined the moment: the ink on her thumb, the folded ballot, the small but powerful act of choosing. And then she looks at the ballot paper. The names are mostly men.
Her vote is hers. But another decision has already been made for her, long before she reaches the polling booth: who gets to appear on the ballot in the first place.
In Pakistan’s 2024 general elections, political parties nominated 280 women among 6,037 candidates for general seats in the national and provincial assemblies–4.64 percent.
I am not surprised by that number, which is, sadly, not unique to Pakistan. But the number on the ballot is only one part of the story. What matters just as much is what happens when women enter institutions of power.
Women currently hold 21.7 percent of seats in Pakistan’s National Assembly. Yet in 2025-26, they submitted 48 percent of its regular parliamentary agenda. According to FAFEN, 72 percent of the agenda submitted by women MNAs concerned core national policy, including economics, taxation, governance and national security. Only six percent was specifically about gender.
These statistics challenge the idea that women’s representation is mainly about giving “women’s issues” a voice. Once women enter institutions of power, they do not simply speak for women or about women. They speak for everyone and about everyone.
That matters because leadership is not only about who occupies a seat. It is also about which experiences, questions, and priorities enter the decisions being made.
Beyond the seat
We tend to count what we can see: parliamentary seats, cabinet positions, board memberships.
But power is often exercised somewhere less visible.
It sits in who gets nominated, which committee you chair, which budget you influence, whose advice is sought before a decision is made, and whose voice carries weight when the room is divided.
The same is true in business.
A 2026 ESG baseline survey of 84 companies found that 14 percent had no women directors, while nearly half had women occupying only 11-15 percent of board positions.
Those numbers matter. But I am increasingly interested in what happens beyond the boardroom.
Who runs the major business lines? Who controls investment decisions? Who enters the succession pipeline? Who decides which technologies a company adopts, and which risks it accepts?
These are often the less visible centres of authority.
We count the seats we can see. Much of the power that shapes outcomes sits somewhere else. And some of these spaces are much harder to see, and therefore much harder to measure.
This is where the leadership gap becomes more complicated. A woman may be present in an institution without necessarily having the influence to shape its decisions. Representation is a starting point; meaningful participation is something more.
The path to power
Perhaps this is why I find my country, Viet Nam, interesting.
In our 2026 elections, women made up 45 percent of candidates and won 30 percent of National Assembly seats, maintaining roughly the same level of representation across two terms. For the first time, women also reached 30 percent of seats in provincial People’s Councils nationwide.
Viet Nam has not solved the problem. But it has understood something important: you do not suddenly get women into positions of power by waiting for them to appear.
You build the path. You identify potential leaders, give them experience and support, build networks, nominate them, and give them a real chance of winning.
Having grown up in Viet Nam and now having spent years in Pakistan, I find the contrast difficult not to notice.
And I have come to believe that representation matters not simply because women deserve a seat. It matters because who is in the room changes what gets noticed, what gets questioned and, sometimes, what gets decided.
That becomes even more important as the problems facing societies become harder to separate into neat categories.
Where tomorrow’s power sits
The rooms themselves are changing.
Artificial intelligence. Digital infrastructure. Climate finance. Energy transitions. The future of work.
These are becoming centres of power in their own right.
Take AI. Who decides what systems are built? What data they learn from? Which risks are acceptable? Which jobs are redesigned? Who benefits and who bears the disruption?
These may sound like technical questions. They are not. They are questions about livelihoods, finance, public services, information, and opportunity.
If women are absent when these systems are designed, regulated, and deployed, choices made today can quietly become the rules of tomorrow, without reflecting the experiences of half the population.
The same question applies to climate finance, energy, and digital government. As these systems shape more of our lives, leadership that draws from a narrow pool of experience risks overlooking how differently their consequences are felt.
And this is where gender equality intersects with the larger question of leadership in a polarized world.
We increasingly frame politics and economics as contests between opposing interests. Gender equality itself can become a zero-sum argument, as if creating space for women means taking power away from someone else.
I do not think it has to be that way.
The challenges ahead rarely have one constituency, one solution, or one winner. They require leadership that can bring different experiences into the room without turning difference into division and navigate competing interests without treating every gain as someone else’s loss.
Diverse leadership does not mean that everyone will agree. It means that more of the people affected by decisions have a chance to shape them, and that leaders are exposed to perspectives they might otherwise miss.
So yes, Pakistan needs more women in parliament. More women on executive boards. More women in decision-making positions. But representation should be a measure of progress, not the destination.
The deeper question is not simply how many women are in positions of power. It is what they are able to do once they get there, and whether their presence changes the quality of decisions being made.
And that brings me back to the polling centre I visited in 2024.
I think about that young woman looking at the ballot paper. Perhaps the most important thing is not simply that one day she sees more women’s names on it. It is that she grows up knowing that she could be one of them.
Not because of a quota. Not simply because a seat has been created for her.
But because she has had the opportunity, experience, and confidence to reach that seat, and, once there, to shape the decisions that affect everyone.
Because equality is not simply about getting women a seat at the table. It is about making sure they are there when the decisions are made.
And, ultimately, whether their presence changes what power does.