Senate Acknowledges Women’s Challenges and Calls for Greater Economic Inclusion: The 2025 Resolution Explained

What happened in the house

The Senate does not usually sit on a Saturday. It met on 8 March 2025, and the day’s business was arranged to mark the occasion.

1. A procedural motion. Under the Senate’s rules a resolution normally needs notice. Senator Rehman moved, under Rule 263, that the relevant rules be set aside. The house agreed.
2. The resolution. She then moved the resolution itself, on her own behalf and for a list of co-sponsors drawn from both sides, among them the opposition’s leader in the Senate.
3. The vote. It was put to the house and passed without dissent.
4. An abrupt end. Shortly afterwards a member pointed out that too few senators were present to continue. The sitting was adjourned to the following Tuesday.

That last detail is small and telling. On the day set aside to honour women, the chamber could not keep a quarter of its members in their seats for the afternoon.

Everyone voted for it. That is the easiest thing in politics to arrange. The harder test of a resolution is whether anyone remembers it when the budget is written.

What the resolution said

What it acknowledged

• That women and girls in Pakistan face lasting economic, social and political barriers.
• That Pakistan stood 145th of 146 on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, having slipped from 142nd the year before.

What it recommended

According to the text as summarised from the Senate’s record, the government was urged to:

• accelerate women’s economic inclusion, in line with that year’s international theme of speeding up action for equality;
• increase financial inclusion, meaning bank accounts and digital payments in women’s own names;
• expand access to credit and to resources for business;
• foster entrepreneurship among women;
• ensure that women can make their own health choices; and
• ensure that girls are not forced to marry under age.

What press reports added

Newspaper accounts of the debate describe a wider list, which may reflect speeches as well as the text:

The last of these mattered to the opposition, several of whose women leaders were in prison at the time. Its inclusion, if confirmed, would explain why both sides signed.

What a Senate resolution is

Parliament can do three different things, and they are often confused.

A resolution has no legal force. No one can go to court to enforce it. The government is not obliged to act on it.

So why pass one?

• It puts a position on record. Every party that voted for it has said, formally, that the facts in it are true.
• It gives campaigners a lever. A minister who resists a reform can be reminded that his own party endorsed it.
• It often comes before a law. Resolutions test whether there is agreement before a bill is drafted.
• It requires an answer. Under the Senate’s rules, resolutions are sent to the ministry concerned, which is expected to report back on what it has done.

The Senate in brief

It helps to know what kind of body spoke.

Pakistan’s Parliament has two houses. The National Assembly is elected directly by the people and chooses the prime minister. The Senate is different in three ways.

• It represents the provinces equally. Each of the four provinces has the same number of senators, whatever its population. Punjab, with more than half the country’s people, has no more than Balochistan, with about six per cent. This is the Senate’s whole purpose: to stop the largest province outvoting the rest.
• It is elected indirectly. Senators are chosen by the members of the provincial assemblies, not by the public. They serve six years, and half the seats come up every three years.
• It cannot be dissolved. The National Assembly can be sent home early. The Senate continues.

Its powers are real but limited. It can pass, amend or block ordinary bills. It has only an advisory voice on the budget. It cannot bring down a government.

That mixture gives the Senate a particular character. Its members are, on the whole, older and more experienced than those of the lower house, and less dependent on the mood of a constituency. It has often been the place where cross-party agreements are reached first. A unanimous resolution on women is exactly the kind of thing it is good at producing. Turning such agreement into money is the business of the other house, which controls the budget.

The international setting

The resolution linked itself to two things happening in the world that month.

The theme of the day. International Women’s Day has an official theme each year. In 2025 it was a call to accelerate action, a recognition that at the current pace equality between men and women is generations away.

The United Nations commission. Each March governments meet in New York at the Commission on the Status of Women. The 2025 session marked thirty years since a landmark world conference on women held in Beijing in 1995, at which Pakistan’s then prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was among the speakers. Governments were asked to report on what they had done since. Pakistan’s place at the foot of the rankings made for an uncomfortable report.

A resolution passed at home on the same day allowed the country’s delegates to say that its Parliament, at least, had admitted the problem.

What the provinces are doing

Because most of the subjects involved belong to the provinces, much of the action is there. A few examples, of varying success:

These are small against the scale of the problem. But they point at the right targets: transport, safety, and money in a woman’s own hands.

Why “economic inclusion”?

The resolution could have concentrated on violence, or schooling, or politics. It chose money. The reason is in the numbers.

When the World Economic Forum scores a country, it looks at four things: health, education, politics and the economy. Pakistan does poorly on all four, but worst by far on the last.

Put simply: seven Pakistani women in ten do not work for pay, and most of those who do work in fields, homes and small workshops, without contracts.

What keeps women out

1. Getting there. Public transport is scarce and often unsafe for women. Many families will not allow a daughter to travel alone.
2. Care. Children, the elderly and the household are treated as women’s work, and childcare is almost non-existent.
3. Harassment. At work and on the way to it.
4. Skills. Fewer girls finish school, and fewer still learn a trade.
5. Money to start. Banks ask for property as security. Women rarely hold property in their own names.
6. Paperwork. An identity card, a bank account, a tax number, a mobile phone registered in one’s own name. Each is harder for a woman to obtain.
7. Permission. In many households a woman needs a man’s consent to do any of the above.

Why it matters to everyone

This is not only a question of fairness. Economists at the international lenders have estimated that if Pakistani women worked for pay at the same rate as men, national income would be larger by a quarter or more. No other single change would do as much.

What exists already

The Senate was not starting from nothing.

The common complaint is that each of these is small beside the problem, and that few are measured.

What has happened since March 2025

A year and a half is enough to compare the resolution with events.

Two conclusions follow.

On marriage and violence, Parliament acted. Whether the resolution caused that is impossible to say. The same senators who moved it were among those who pushed the bills.

On the economy, the centre of the resolution, there is less to show. The 2026 ranking improved mainly because more girls were in education. On economic participation Pakistan was still second from last in the world.

Women in the Senate itself

The house that passed the resolution is itself a measure of the problem.

• The Senate has 96 members. Seventeen seats are reserved for women, four from each province and one from the capital. Women may also win general seats, but few do.
• So fewer than one senator in five is a woman.
• A woman has never chaired the Senate.
• Women senators from different parties work together through a women’s parliamentary caucus, which has backed many of the laws described here.

Senator Rehman, who moved it, has been one of the most persistent legislators on these subjects for two decades. She was the author of earlier bills on harassment and on violence against women.

What would make the difference

Researchers who study women’s work in Pakistan tend to return to a short and practical list.

None of this needs a constitutional amendment. Most of it needs a line in a provincial budget.

That is the quiet weakness of a resolution passed in Islamabad. The Senate can say what should be done. The buses, the childcare centres and the women police officers are paid for by four provincial governments, each with its own priorities, and none of them is bound by what senators agreed on a Saturday in March.

Words used in this article

Timeline

For how laws pass from one house to the other, read our explainers on the Senate and the National Assembly.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Senate of Pakistan, record of proceedings for 8 March 2025
• Senate of Pakistan, text of Resolution No. 584
• Geo News, “Senate passes resolution on women’s rights proposed by Sherry Rehman” — 8 March 2025.
• The News, “Senate unanimously passes resolution for gender equality” — March 2025.
• ProPakistani, “Pakistan climbs five places in Global Gender Gap Report 2026” — 17 September 2026.
• Senate of Pakistan, text of the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act, 2026
• Government of Balochistan, The Balochistan Child Marriages Restraint Act 2025
• Gulf News, “Pakistan’s Punjab Assembly passes law setting 18 as minimum marriage age” — April 2026.