In the last deacde, women have slowly but surely made their way into various professional fields in Pakistan that are very competitive and respected. This is due to changing institutional openness on the one hand and women’s efforts on the other to carve out career opportunities that used to be considered impossible. When all four fields are taken into account together, it can be seen through the numbers that this is not just a small step but an important one.
These trends are quite evident in the case of technology and freelancing economy. There are more than 2.3 million freelancers currently operating in Pakistan, putting Pakistan among the top countries for having such a huge number of freelancing labor forces. It is also estimated by the government officials in 2025 that around eight million women are involved in one form or another of online work. Government’s own DigiSkills.pk program, which has trained around 4.5 million people since 2018, has also trained around 800,000 women in particular, and the percentage of females who have been participating in this training scheme has grown from a lower figure to around 28 percent of the total number of trainees.
In light of its unique record of pioneering achievements, aviation can be described as a small yet symbolic case study. In 1990, Maliha Sami made history as the first woman pilot in the Pakistan International Airlines, while Shahnaz Laghari later became the first woman wearing the hijab to fly commercially anywhere in the world. In 2013, Ayesha Farooq was the first woman fighter pilot qualified to participate in combat operations in the Pakistan Air Force. Farooq was one of nineteen women who had joined the PAF as pilots in the previous ten years, while ten years before that, there were around a hundred women serving in the air force.
Such feats have also been achieved in the sports of hockey and cricket, where the national teams of women in Pakistan have secured themselves international ratings and media coverage owing to the development of domestic leagues and increased sponsorship by the Pakistan Cricket Board in the last few years.
Most shockingly, perhaps, are the statistics gathered through the Civil Service data of 2025. The number of women was higher than men in the final selection process of the nation’s most challenging entrance to its bureaucracy, where 177 women cleared the written portion of the Central Superior Services examination while 178 men cleared the same portion. From the total of 170 people finally recommended for appointment, there were 86 women and 84 men.
Collectively, then, these statistics prove that success of women in the professional fields of Pakistan is measurable, specific to each sector, and on the rise.
