EDITORIAL: That many men in this country holding responsible positions still view women as male property unworthy of autonomy and agency is shocking but true.
A courageous woman, Zahida Parveen, has successfully challenged this deeply entrenched gender bias. According to reports, in March 2013 she was appointed as a teacher at the Government Girls Primary School in Karak district, under a deceased person’s son/ daughter quota governed by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Civil Servants (Appointment, Promotion, and Transfer) Rules, 1989.
However, two months later, i.e., in May of the same year, the district education officer terminated her services, saying the benefit of employment under a deceased person’s quota was not available to a female who contracts marriage. The undisguised assumption was that a female is dependent either on her father or husband, not an autonomous individual. Approached by the aggrieved person, the provincial government endorsed the discriminatory action against her maintaining that a married daughter may be considered eligible for appointment only if she has separated from her husband becoming dependent on her parents. In other words, a woman has no right to run her own life.
Creditably for her, Zahida Parveen did not give up a just fight despite facing gender bias at every step of the way from the district officer to the provincial government and the Service Tribunal. Finally, she challenged the impugned order in the Supreme Court. A two-member bench comprising Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah and Justice Athar Minallah announced its verdict on Thursday, declaring as discriminatory and incompatible with constitutional guarantees the exclusion of married daughters from compassionate appointment, and ordered the education department to restore the petitioner’s appointment with all back benefits. The verdict authored by Justice Shah puts the finger on the real reasons behind such cases of gender discrimination, explicating that the exclusion of married daughters from the ambit of Rule 10 (4) is not merely a procedural irregularity, “it reveals a deeper structural flaw grounded in patriarchal assumptions about a woman’s identity and her role within the legal and economic orders”. And that the exclusion constitutes a denial of a woman’s right to financial and economic independence – rights that are not ancillary but essential to the exercise of constitutional personhood. The court, in its wisdom has declared that “any presumption that a married woman becomes financially dependent on her husband is legally untenable, religiously unfounded and contrary to the egalitarian spirit of the Islamic law.”
No less important, the two honourable judges also deemed it necessary to “reaffirm” that all judicial and administrative authorities have a constitutional duty to adopt gender-sensitive and gender-neutral language. This truly landmark verdict sets a great precedent benefitting many other women able and eager to compete with their male counterparts in different fields of national endeavour.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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