As a tech woman in Pakistan who started her career 15 years ago, there were very few platforms for girls who were interested in technology. If you had an idea, you mostly kept it to yourself. If you wanted a mentor, you hoped you would somehow meet one. If you wanted to know what a career in technology looked like, you had to figure out yourself. Today, a young woman entering technology has more places to look. There are communities, competitions, bootcamps, accelerators and mentors, and increasingly, women she can see herself becoming. But while the ecosystem has grown, the gender gap in Pakistan’s workforce and digital economy remains significant.
Pakistan’s latest position in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2026 makes that difficult to ignore. Pakistan ranked 143rd out of 145 economies, with its weakest performance in Economic Participation and Opportunity, where it ranked 144th globally and last in Southern Asia. The country’s gender parity score for labour-force participation was just 34.6%. The disparity becomes even more pronounced as we look at professional progression: Pakistan recorded a 44.9% parity score for professional and technical workers, compared with only 6.5% for legislators, senior officials and managers. The report also notes that Pakistan’s educational attainment parity has improved considerably, reaching 91.7% in 2026, suggesting that the challenge is increasingly not simply whether women are acquiring education, but whether that education translates into economic participation, income and leadership.
This matters enormously for Pakistan’s technology sector. Technology is no longer a niche industry operating at the margins of the economy. Pakistan’s IT and IT-enabled services sector is becoming an increasingly important contributor to exports, employment, entrepreneurship and digital transformation. At the same time, artificial intelligence is changing the skills that companies need and the way products and services are designed, developed, and delivered. Pakistan is talking about AI adoption, digital exports, startups, freelancing and a future-ready workforce. But there is a fundamental development question underneath all of this: who gets to participate in building Pakistan’s digital and AI economy?
The answer cannot be a workforce that systematically loses women along the way.
The technology-sector data, although imperfect, points to a persistent problem. An earlier P@SHA study found that women represented around 14% of Pakistan’s IT workforce and about 13% of IT managers. The study also identified a significant mid-career bottleneck: 41% of women surveyed had between four and 15 years of work experience, but only 13% reached general management, with a 24% decline between the four-to-seven-year and eight-to-15-year experience groups. These are older figures and should not be treated as a current headcount of Pakistan’s technology workforce. More recent sector analysis by P@SHA estimates women’s representation at around 17%, while noting that independent estimates remain around 14%. What the different estimates have in common is the underlying concern: women remain significantly underrepresented in Pakistan’s technology workforce and leadership.
The reasons are rarely as simple as a lack of technical ability. A young woman may have the skills but lack a professional network. She may have an idea but no mentor. She may hesitate to apply for a role because she does not meet every requirement. She may leave the workforce because of caregiving responsibilities and find that returning is considerably harder than leaving. She may want to build a technology company but have limited access to capital, customers or networks. These barriers are often framed as individual challenges for women to overcome. From a development perspective, they are better understood as ecosystem gaps affecting Pakistan’s human capital, productivity and economic participation.
The digital gender divide is an important part of this equation. Pakistan made significant progress in 2024: according to GSMA, the proportion of women using mobile internet increased from 33% in 2023 to 45% in 2024, bringing around eight million women online in one year. The mobile internet gender gap narrowed from 38% to 25%, with much of the increase driven by rural women. This is real progress and demonstrates that coordinated action by government, telecom operators, and other stakeholders can move the needle.
But connectivity is only the first layer of digital inclusion. GSMA found that 35% of female mobile internet users in Pakistan accessed mobile internet exclusively through someone else’s phone, compared with 6% of male users. A woman may technically be “online” and still lacking reliable, private and consistent access to the digital tools she needs for education, employment, entrepreneurship or AI skills. The development sector has long understood that access to infrastructure alone does not create equal outcomes. The same principle applies to digital inclusion.
For women in technology, the pathway therefore has to extend beyond connectivity and training. It has to include digital literacy, advanced technical skills, mentorship, professional networks, workplace policies, access to finance, leadership opportunities, and pathways back into employment. This is where the conversation around women in AI also becomes important. If AI is going to influence the future of work, public services, healthcare, education, finance and business in Pakistan, women cannot simply be users of these technologies. They need opportunities to become developers, designers, researchers, testers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and decisionmakers shaping how AI is built and deployed.
This is not only a gender-equality issue. It is a development issue.
Pakistan cannot afford to invest in girls’ education and digital skills and then lose that human capital when women reach the workforce. Nor can it expect to build a globally competitive technology and AI economy while a significant part of its potential talent remains outside formal employment or underrepresented in leadership. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 data reinforce this disconnect: Pakistan has made substantial progress in educational attainment, but economic participation remains its weakest gender-gap dimension.
The response therefore needs to extend across the ecosystem. Universities can build stronger bridges between computer science classrooms and industry. Employers can examine hiring, promotion, mentorship, flexibility, and return-to-work pathways. Investors and accelerators can widen their networks and create more opportunities for women founders. Policymakers can incorporate gender-disaggregated data and measurable inclusion targets into digital-economy, AI and workforce strategies. Development partners can support programmes that connect digital skills to actual employment and income rather than treating training as the end point.
And the private sector has an important role to play here.
This is where initiatives such as Women Tech Quest become relevant beyond the competition itself. Launched by 10Pearls in 2017, WTQ has grown into a national platform for women in technology. Its 2024 edition brought more than 1,200 women together across Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, while 10Pearls reports that more than 70 WTQ participants have subsequently joined the company. Those numbers are useful indicators of reach, but the deeper value of such platforms is often harder to measure.
A competition can give a woman visibility. A mentor can give her directions. A professional connection can lead to an interview. A community can give her the confidence to stay. An opportunity to demonstrate her skills can change how an employer sees her — and how she sees herself. These individual moments may not appear in national development indicators, but they contribute to the accumulation of human capital that those indicators are ultimately trying to measure.
As WTQ enters its tenth year, its evolution also reflects the changing technology landscape. This year’s competition brings together coding, design, and testing, with artificial intelligence embedded across the tracks. That matters because Pakistan should not only be preparing women to enter yesterday’s technology jobs. It needs to prepare them to build, design, test, manage, and lead in an economy where AI is changing the nature of work itself.
But competitions cannot solve structural gender gaps on their own. A woman should not have to win a competition to be noticed. A promising participant needs a pathway to the next opportunity. A university graduate needs a bridge into industry. A woman returning after a career break needs a credible route back into the workforce. A founder needs customers, capital, and networks, not just a certificate. And a young professional needs to see women in senior technology roles often enough that leadership is viewed as an achievable career path rather than an exception.
This is where Pakistan’s development conversation around women in technology needs to mature. We have spent years asking how to get more girls interested in STEM, how to bring more women online and how to teach women digital skills. Those questions remain important, but they are no longer enough. We also need to ask what happens after the training, after graduation, after the first job and at the point where a woman is ready to move into management, entrepreneurship or leadership.
The real measure of digital inclusion is not simply how many women are connected. It is whether connectivity creates opportunities. The measure of women’s participation in technology is not simply how many women enter the sector. It is whether they can build sustainable careers, earn, lead, innovate and shape the technologies that will define Pakistan’s future. Pakistan has made progress. The opportunity now is to ensure that progress does not stop access.
If we want technology and artificial intelligence to become engines of economic growth, innovation and employment, women need to be part of the entire value chain, from learning and building to earning and leading. Pakistan’s technology future will not be built by technology alone. It will be built by people, by institutions and by the choices we make about whose talent gets an opportunity to shape what comes next.
