Written By:Humaira Noreen
Published By: ANI News Agency
For decades, the conversation about women’s economic empowerment has focused on one question: are women earning?
The harder question, the one we ask far less often, is this: who controls the money women earn?
Consider a woman running a small home-based business in Pakistan. Every morning she prepares her products, manages customers, tracks orders, and contributes to household income. Her earnings may cover school fees, medical bills, daily household costs. By almost any definition, she is economically active.
Yet when she wants to expand her work, invest her earnings, open a financial account, save independently, or make a major financial decision, she may still need someone else’s approval.
Her challenge is not the absence of work. It is the absence of control.
Naming what’s actually happening
In my own research into women’s digital financial inclusion in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with a validation visit to Sindh, I’ve come to call this pre-access exclusion: a woman can be formally enrolled in a financial system — issued an account, a wallet, a digital ID — and still be excluded from every meaningful decision about what happens to that money, before any bank, app, or algorithm ever comes into play. The exclusion isn’t in the technology. It happens earlier, inside the household, before access even becomes relevant.
This distinction sits at the centre of Pakistan’s hidden financial inequality. A woman may work outside the home, run a small enterprise, or earn through informal labour, and be described as financially independent simply because she generates income. But earning money and controlling money are not the same thing. Economic empowerment isn’t only about having an income — it’s about having the power to decide whether to save it, invest it, spend it, or risk it.
What the numbers actually show
Pakistan’s female labour force participation rate sits at roughly 24 per cent, among the lowest in South Asia and well below the global average of over 50 per cent. But participation is only half the picture. The 2024 Karandaaz Financial Inclusion Survey found that only 14 per cent of Pakistani women had access to a bank account, mobile wallet, or other financial service, against 56 per cent of men — and just 11 per cent had a registered mobile money account, against 48 per cent of men. Research from CGAP puts Pakistan’s gender gap in account ownership at roughly 30 percentage points, one of the widest in South Asia.
Even where access exists, control often doesn’t follow it. A 2021 analysis of Pakistan’s Demographic and Health Survey data found that barely half of married women had any real say over decisions involving their own earnings, healthcare spending, or household purchases. A bank account does not automatically create financial independence. A mobile wallet does not automatically create financial confidence. Access is a precondition for empowerment. It is not empowerment itself.
The invisible barriers inside households
Financial inequality is often invisible precisely because it lives inside ordinary household decisions, not in any single dramatic moment.
Who decides whether money gets saved? Who decides whether a woman’s income goes toward her business, her children’s education, or someone else’s priorities? Who decides whether she can take a financial risk at all?
These are not questions markets or banks can answer. They are questions about social relationships. Families often play a genuinely supportive role — many women study, work, or start businesses because of family encouragement. But that support is incomplete when a woman is allowed to earn and not trusted to decide.
Informal work, invisible contributions
The problem sharpens for women in informal work — home-based production, agriculture, domestic labour, family enterprises — without contracts, legal protection, or institutional recognition. Because this labour is so often tied into family networks, women can contribute the work without holding equal authority over what that work produces. It’s a paradox worth naming plainly: women contribute to the economy while remaining largely absent from decisions about it.
Recognising women’s work, then, isn’t only about counting how many women earn. It’s about recognising their right to influence how what they earn gets used.
Financial literacy has to mean more than budgeting
Financial literacy programmes tend to focus on practical skills: saving, opening accounts, using digital payments, tracking expenses. These are necessary skills, but they stop short of the real problem. Women also need the confidence to negotiate financial decisions inside their own households, to understand their financial rights, and to plan for the long term — not just manage the short term.
A financially literate woman isn’t only someone who knows how to save. She’s someone who understands that money is a source of choice, not just a resource to be managed on someone else’s terms.
Why this matters for Pakistan
This is not only a gender issue. It is a development issue. When women have real control over resources, families tend to invest more in education, health, and long-term planning. When women’s economic contribution stays invisible, or their decision-making power stays limited, the country loses real human and economic potential it cannot afford to lose.
The question Pakistan needs to ask is no longer just how many women are earning. It’s how many women are able to decide. Because economic empowerment doesn’t begin when a woman starts earning. It begins when she moves from being a contributor to being a decision-maker — and Pakistan’s next step in financial inclusion should be built around closing that gap, not just the one that gets a woman her first bank account.
