Walk through any major city in Pakistan, and you’ll find that urban spaces speak a masculine language – the result of a parochial, patriarchal project sustained over centuries.
From dimly lit streets and poorly maintained sidewalks to male-dominated public transport and unwelcoming parks, our cities have long been built for and around men. This isn’t by accident; it’s the result of decades of planning that excluded the voices and needs of women, girls and gender-diverse individuals.
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s urban centres (Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Quetta, etc) have ample room for improvement. Despite women making up nearly half the population, their visibility in public and economic life remains limited.
Female labour force participation peaked at 24.4 per cent in 2011 but declined to 21.3 per cent by 2021 (per the latest labour force data), reflecting stagnation. While 13.4 million new jobs were created between 2011 and 2021, only 2.5 million went to women. Harassment in public transport, unsafe parks, and infrastructure that neglects women’s needs, such as a lack of sanitation facilities contributing to school dropout post-puberty, further reinforce exclusion, ensuring that Pakistan’s cities remain far from truly inclusive urban spaces.
These challenges are compounded by Pakistan’s broader gender disparities. Ranked 148th out of 148 countries in the WEF’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report (parity score 56.7 per cent), Pakistan lags behind even conflict-affected nations. Critics note that the WEF framework focuses on formal metrics while ignoring women’s contributions in informal labour, unpaid care, and grassroots roles. Yet, despite gains in education, unsafe cities, outdated infrastructure and gender-based violence, with over 60,000 abuse cases in Punjab in 2024 and a 3.0 per cent rape conviction rate, keep our deeply patriarchal society a citadel of gender injustice.
Without gender-sensitive urban planning and meaningful reform, these structural barriers will continue to marginalise half the population. This is concerning, as female literacy has risen – for instance, 88 per cent of 13-year-old girls in urban Punjab are now literate – signaling a coming wave of potential female workers who will need safe, accessible, and inclusive cities to thrive. Given fiscal constraints, it is inevitable that Pakistan must fully leverage this segment of the labour force.
Building safer, more inclusive cities demands moving beyond male-centric urban design and centring women’s lived realities. With 68 per cent of working women still in the shrinking agricultural sector and female literacy at 52.8 per cent, cities must enable women’s transition into services and manufacturing. This means investing in gender-disaggregated data, co-designing public spaces with women and removing entrenched barriers, such as adolescent school dropouts caused by inadequate sanitation and facilities.
What would gender-informed urban design look like in Pakistan? At the very outset, advancing gender equality in Pakistan demands comprehensive legal and institutional reforms. Uniform, enforceable laws against gender-based violence, early marriage, and workplace discrimination must be implemented across all provinces. Judicial reforms should prioritise survivor-centred justice by ensuring swift case resolution and holding law enforcement accountable through robust oversight.
Equally, a more thoughtful approach to transport planning must reflect women’s actual mobility patterns – often multiple short trips in a day, sometimes with children. Expanding reliable, affordable local transport and ensuring step-free access with adequate seating can transform both safety and accessibility for women in public spaces.
Public toilets, a glaring omission in most cities, should be designed to be safer and more inclusive, with consideration for needs such as childcare and menstrual hygiene. Similarly, keeping markets and public spaces active into the evening, with improved lighting and a supportive security presence trained in gender sensitivity, could help create environments where more women feel comfortable and welcome.
Representation matters too. Public spaces should reflect the diverse identities of those who live in them. This can be as symbolic as naming streets after women or installing statues that celebrate female leaders, or as practical as ensuring women sit on municipal boards that decide zoning and budgetary allocations.
Some international case studies offer guidance. Vienna, for example, has embedded gender mainstreaming into city planning, ensuring equitable access to parks, transport, and housing. Barcelona’s exploratory walks involve women in assessing the safety and usability of public spaces. These are not utopian ideals; they are models of what can happen when gender equity becomes a core principle, not an optional add-on.
In Pakistan, change must start with political will. Local governments can lead by introducing gender-responsive budgeting, allocating funds specifically to projects that improve safety and accessibility for women. City development authorities should mandate gender impact assessments for all major infrastructure projects. Planning teams must be diverse, and developers encouraged to hire gender champions who ensure inclusivity from design to implementation. Progress should also be tracked. Municipalities can adopt KPIs such as changes in crime rates, increased female participation in public spaces, or even simple perception surveys asking women how safe they feel walking home at night.
To build truly inclusive smart cities, we must replace the one-size-fits-men technology with AI systems grounded in gender-disaggregated data, ethical oversight and meaningful participation from women and girls. Artificial intelligence, if paired with gender-sensitive planning, could predict and prevent harassment, map unsafe zones, optimise street lighting to women’s mobility patterns, and redesign public transport using sex-disaggregated travel data.
It could also address healthcare blind spots by recognising gender-specific symptoms and removing bias from hiring algorithms. With diverse datasets and inclusive design from the outset, AI can dismantle structural barriers that have kept women’s needs invisible in urban policy; without such intentionality, it risks amplifying existing discrimination, as evidenced by a Berkeley Haas study showing gender bias in 44 per cent of AI systems.
A city that forgets its women forgets itself. In the maze of concrete and cold logic, where transit maps loop without meaning and lights flicker over empty benches, the absence echoes. When women cannot move freely, walk without calculation or appear without permission, the city grows brittle, its rhythm falters. The economy stutters. Public spaces decay. The promise of prosperity folds in on itself.
Pakistan stands between progress and paralysis. With fast-growing cities and an aware youth, we must choose: keep women in the footnotes or make them the starting point, from the very first line.
Furqan Ali is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector. Arfa Ijaz is an environmental engineer and a researcher working in the energy sector.