When I read the 2025 Global Gender Gap Report, I felt a sinking sense of familiarity. Pakistan, for the first time, ranked last — 148th out of 148 countries. The score? Just 56.7 percent parity across economic, educational, health, and political indicators.

This wasn’t just a slip in ranking—it was a freefall. Pakistan now lags behind every other country in the world, including those in active conflict. What made it harder to process was the timing. Just days earlier, the federal government had unveiled what it called a “gender responsive” budget for 2025–26, complete with a gender budget statement and the announcement that 6.9 percent of the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) — amounting to PKR 291 billion — had been tagged as gender-sensitive.

Tagging Isn’t Transformation

The federal government’s gender budget statement uses all the right language. Gender tagging has been applied across over 5,000 cost centers, mapped to domains like education, health, governance, employment, safety, and political participation. This is a promising step. However, tagging alone is not enough. Without actual investments and accountability, it risks becoming a bureaucratic exercise.

So why this disconnect? How can a country that claims to embed gender across its planning rank dead last in global equality metrics — especially in a year that the World Economic Forum calls the fastest progress in closing the gender gap since COVID-19? The answer is uncomfortably clear: we are tagging gender — we are not investing in it.

Where’s the Money for Women?

Explicit women-focused projects make up just 0.2 percent of the PSDP in FY 2025–26, based on the Rs 1 trillion federal development budget. This marks a decline from previous years.

In a country where nearly half the population is female, this level of spending is not just insufficient — it is negligent. Even when broader programs like girls’ schools and maternal health are included, the total investment in female-centered education and health reaches only 0.57 percent. This refers specifically to gender-tagged components.

This is not a one-year anomaly. The Special Committee on Gender Mainstreaming noted that only 1.3 percent of the PSDP during 2020–2025 was allocated to women-focused development.

Reading Between the Index Lines

These figures stand in stark contrast to the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) 2025. Of all subindexes, Economic Participation and Opportunity remains Pakistan’s worst-performing area, with a score of 34.7 percent. Female labor force participation remains between 22 and 24 percent, according to the Labour Force Survey 2023–24.

The sole area of improvement is Educational Attainment, which rose by 1.5 percentage points to 85.1 percent parity. However, this is partially due to a drop in male tertiary enrolment, narrowing the gender gap without improving absolute access for girls. Boys and girls face similar access challenges, not equitable opportunities.

The GGGI focuses on gaps, not levels. So, if both men and women perform poorly — as in education — the index may still show a narrow gap, while masking the depth of deprivation. In Pakistan’s case: parity in suffering is still suffering.

Two key indicators — political participation and women in senior management — lack nuance. For example, the political empowerment subindex counts women in parliament and years with a female head of state, but misses women’s roles in political parties, voter behavior, or grassroots leadership. Decision-making is not confined to parliamentary seats; it also includes choices women make when contesting elections or voting.

To address these gaps, it is essential broaden the criteria for measuring women's leadership. This means integrating metrics like the number of women contesting elections, voter turnout among women, and their representation in public service.

Moreover, Pakistan’s National Time Use Survey hasn’t been updated since 2007, leaving no recent data on unpaid care work. There is also no formal dataset disaggregating wage equality by sector or region. This limits our ability to measure women’s invisible labor or analyze wage gaps accurately.

Most critically, the GGGI doesn’t capture reforms or institutional shifts until they affect statistical outcomes. Pakistan’s efforts — like gender budgeting, safety net reforms, or police gender desks — remain invisible until they influence global metrics.

This isn’t to say token measures deserves global applause. But indices must evolve to track not only outcomes but also long-term commitments. Domestically too, these reforms are underutilized. Without funding, enforcement, and policy coherence, tagging efforts remain symbolic.

Lost in Translation: The Policy–Metric Disconnect

This disconnect affects more than statistics. It distorts how countries like Pakistan are perceived. Global tools like the GGGI are often treated as definitive, yet they miss crucial nuances. They can fail to see intent, momentum, and institutional groundwork if that hasn’t yet translated into data points. That creates a risk of erasing the present while also ignoring the structural investment needed for the future.