Pashtun women today: education, work and public life

At a glance

• In Pakistan's 2023 census, 52.8 per cent of women were literate, up from 49.7 per cent in 2017. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where most of Pakistan's Pashtuns live, stood at 51.1 per cent overall, and one table of the census puts its women at 37.15 per cent against 64.57 per cent for men. [8, 10]

• A 2021 survey found 2.9 million girls aged 5 to 16 out of school in the province, 53 per cent of that age group, and 74.4 per cent of girls in the merged tribal districts. [11]

• In Afghanistan, the last government survey before the Taliban's return (2016-17) put adult literacy at 34.8 per cent, with women's rate 0.40 of men's. [1]

• Since 2022 the Taliban government has kept girls out of school beyond sixth grade and women out of universities. UNESCO counted about 2.4 million girls shut out of secondary school in August 2026. [28]

• Pashtun women have been elected, have led parties, marched in protests, taught in hiding and been shot for going to school. Pashtuns disagree about much of it.

What the numbers say, and what they leave out

No census counts Pashtuns as a group, so the figures come as provinces and countries. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is mostly Pashtun but not wholly, and Pashtuns also live in Balochistan, in Karachi and across Afghanistan. With that said, the gap is steep.

Gallup Pakistan's analysis of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics' 2023 census tables puts national literacy at 60.7 per cent and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at 51.1 per cent. [10] Rural women across Pakistan stood at 47.5 per cent against 69.4 per cent for urban women. [10] On Gallup's gender parity index, women's literacy as a share of men's was 29.5 per cent in Orakzai, 29.6 per cent in Khyber and 30.8 per cent in Bajaur, against 77.7 per cent for the country. [10] A table drawn from the census by the State of Children project gives the provincial figures as 64.57 per cent for men and 37.15 per cent for women. [8]

Schooling is where those figures start. A Benazir Income Support Programme survey, reported by Dawn in October 2021, counted 4.7 million children aged 5 to 16 out of school in the province, 39 per cent of the age group. [11] Of 5.4 million girls, 2.9 million were out of school, against 1.7 million of 6.2 million boys. [11] In the merged tribal districts 74.4 per cent of girls and 38.5 per cent of boys were not attending; in the settled districts, 47 per cent and 27.2 per cent. [11] Asked why, 65.2 per cent of households named poverty and 15.2 per cent the low standard of schools. [11] The provincial education minister blamed the pandemic, child labour and missing schools. [11]

Afghanistan before 2021 had the same shape. The 2016-17 Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey, run by the Central Statistics Organization, found 34.8 per cent of adults and 53.6 per cent of 15 to 24 year olds literate. Women's adult rate was 0.40 of men's, and young women's 0.57 of young men's. [1] The survey does not break the results down by ethnic group. The 2004 constitution said that on average at least two women should be elected from each province to the lower house. [2]

None of this is new. Amanullah Khan saw Kabul's first girls' school open in 1921 under Queen Soraya's patronage, and the Mangal leaders of Khost who rose against him in 1924 named schools for girls among their objections. Women joined the Khudai Khidmatgar, in black, and marched with it to Babra in 1948. How far a girl may go in school has been argued among Pashtuns for a century.

Work and who decides it

A World Bank study by Silvia Redaelli and Noor Rahman, published in 2021, is the closest look at what keeps women out of paid work in a Pashtun city. The Pakistan Labour Force Survey put women's labour force participation in urban Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at 9.4 per cent in 2017-18. The authors' own Peshawar survey, which asked more carefully about home-based work, raised it to 13.4 per cent, and to 15.5 per cent with food grown for the household. [7]

In that survey 85 per cent of working-age women believed women should work for pay, but only 7.6 per cent could freely decide to do so, and most said a husband or father decided. [7] Fifty-four per cent had not finished primary school, and 30 per cent reported some form of sexual harassment on leaving home. [7] Women spent 5.3 hours a day on housework and care, men almost none. [7]

The women in the study do not all want the same thing. A former school helper said a woman should do home-based work so she can watch the children, and the authors call such attitudes "often espoused by women themselves". [7] In their focus groups, women said they wanted their daughters to finish school and to work for pay if they wished. [7] For how namus works inside a household, see Namus.

Voices in verse, then and now

Pashto's women poets are older than its modern schools. The articles on Nazo Tokhi, Zainab Hotak and Halima Khattak all rest on one 1944 book, the Pata Khazana, whose authenticity is disputed, and say so. Malalai of Maiwand is remembered through two landays, the two-line folk verse women sing and pass on, though no document of 1880 names her.

A living poet carries the line forward. Parween Faiz Zadah Malaal was born in Kandahar province in 1957 and studied in Kandahar and then at Kabul University. She began as a journalist on the Kandahar paper Tolo-e-Afghan, worked for Radio Afghanistan in Kabul, lived as a refugee in Pakistan and served as cultural attache at the Afghan consulate in Karachi. [9] The Poetry Translation Centre calls her one of the most popular women poets writing in Pashto. One poem in Dawood Azami's translation begins "Like a desert flower waiting for rain". [9]

Pashtun women in elected politics

Begum Nasim Wali Khan is the best documented case in Pakistan. The Dawn writer Meraj Hamayun Khan, a former education minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who was her classmate at the College of Home Economics in Peshawar, opens her memorial with a sentence that sums up the difficulty: "Pakhtun women rise with great difficulty but fall speedily into oblivion, ending up in the same 'protected' and enviously 'guarded' institution called home." [17]

Nasim was born in Mardan, was allowed to finish her matriculation, and in 1954 married Abdul Wali Khan, the son and political heir of Bacha Khan, as his second wife. [17] She was the daughter of Ameer Mohammad Khan Hoti, a figure of the Khudai Khidmatgar. [16] When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto banned the National Awami Party in 1975 and jailed her husband and the party's leaders, she stepped into the gap, led a campaign for their release and in 1977 won two National Assembly seats. [16, 17] Dawn's memorial calls her the first woman elected from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on a general seat. [17] She later led the Awami National Party in the provincial assembly and served as its provincial president. [16, 17]

Her later years were harder. She formed her own faction in 2014 and merged it back into the party in 2017. [16] Meraj Hamayun Khan writes that her rivals "at home and within the party" united "to clip her wings and call her back to her home". [17] Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, a rival of her family in Charsadda, praised her struggle for democracy when she died in 2021. [16] She said that "Ignoring women means ignoring the majority of society." [17]

Bushra Gohar grew up in Jhandha village in Swabi, the youngest daughter of a retired army colonel, studied in the United States, set up a women's organisation and in 2008 won a seat in the National Assembly, rising to deputy of the ANP. [18] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Farkhanda Wazir and Farangis Najibullah reported in 2011 that she had a written threat from the Taliban to leave politics, and quoted her: "I have no intention of leaving politics because of the death threats I get." [18] Her focus, they wrote, was the education of girls. [18] She said she did not see quotas "as a privilege for women" and wanted a society that recognised people on merit. [18] A journalist from Swabi, Sadia Qasim, told the reporters that Gohar dwelt too much on roads and power and should take up honour killings and domestic violence. [18]

At the ballot box the picture is mixed. In the by-election for PK-95 in Lower Dir on 7 May 2015, Dawn reported that not one woman voted, and on 2 June the Election Commission voided the result, the first time it had done so over the exclusion of women. [20] The Peshawar High Court had dismissed a petition by twelve women voters days earlier because they could not show that officials had stopped them. [21] In August 2018 the commission voided the Shangla PK-23 result, where the petitioner's lawyer said women cast 3,505 of 69,827 ballots, under the 10 per cent threshold of the Elections Act 2017. [22] The winner, Shaukat Yousafzai, called the ruling "cruel" and said only women should have voted again; his lawyer said two polling stations were combined ones that women tend to avoid. [22]

Girls' schools in Swat, 2007 to 2009

Swat's story reaches us through local reporters and a schoolgirl from the valley. Maulana Fazlullah's Taliban held the valley from 2007 to 2009, and the Swat article gives the politics. A seventh-grade girl wrote a diary for BBC Urdu as Gul Makai. On 3 January 2009 she wrote that only 11 of 27 girls came to class, and that three friends had moved to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi. [3] On 14 January her principal announced winter holidays with no reopening date, and she looked at the building "as if I would not come here again". [3] The Taliban's Shah Dauran had announced the ban on FM radio, and it took effect on 15 January. [3]

The Taliban were not of one voice. On 26 December 2008 the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Maulvi Mohammad Umer told reporters the movement was not against girls' education, wanted girls to study in the veil, and hoped its Swat branch would revoke the order. [12] The Swat spokesman, Muslim Khan, gave conflicting answers. [12] The provincial information minister said those restricting girls' schooling were disobeying the Prophet, since education is compulsory for men and women. [12]

How many schools were destroyed depends on the count. The BBC reported about 150 in the year to January 2009. [3] The IPS reporter Ashfaq Yusufzai, from the local education authorities, gave 188 girls' and 97 boys' schools between February 2008 and March 2009, and around 90,000 children out of school. [13] In 2013 the provincial minister Muhammad Atif said 750 schools had been damaged by the Taliban across the province and 650 rebuilt. [14] Malala Yousafzai said in 2014 that more than 400 had been destroyed. [4]

Malala Yousafzai, and how Swat sees her

Malala Yousafzai was shot in a school van on 9 October 2012, survived, was flown to Britain and in 2014 shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi. [4, 14] In Oslo she called herself "the first Pashtun, the first Pakistani, and the youngest person" to receive it, said she was named after Malalai of Maiwand, "the Pashtun Joan of Arc", and said that in her own village "there is still no secondary school for girls". [4] She answered the Taliban's religious claims in Islamic terms: "the very first word of the Holy Quran is the word Iqra, which means read". [4]

Swat opinion split, and reporters from the province recorded both sides. Ashfaq Yusufzai's IPS report of October 2013, "Swat Not at Peace With Malala", found girls' enrolment in the district's primary schools up from 85,650 in 2010 to 126,678 in 2013 on official figures, and 700 pupils at her old school against 450 in 2009. [14] A principal, Zahira Shahid, called her "a motivational force for local girls", and the education officer Mushtari Begum said most girls consider her a role model. [14] Muhammad Jaffar of the PTI said she was a champion "when all politicians and civil society organisations were tightlipped for fear of the Taliban". [14]

The same report found people who disagreed. Ghufran Ali, a teacher at the Degree College in Swat, said "the local population feels betrayed by Malala", that she "abandoned the people of Swat", and that world media had blown the incident out of proportion because of Western interest. [14] A jobless graduate, Mushtaq Ali, said people knew she would not return and so did not like her. [14] The Taliban spokesman Shahidullah Shahid said she "abandoned Islam for secularism". [14]

She went back on 31 March 2018 for two hours, by army helicopter. Dawn's Fazal Khaliq reported that she and her father wept in their old house and that residents "generally praised" her for improving education, especially for girls. [15] A resident, Arshad Ali, said: "People have positive as well as negative views about her." [15]

Pashtun women as protesters and activists

Women also take part in the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, which began in 2018 in the former tribal districts to demand an end to killings and disappearances. [19] Freshta Jalalzai of Radio Free Afghanistan reported in 2019 that its women had "broken taboos and stereotypes" by joining and sometimes leading protests. [19] Wranga Luni, a medical student, spoke to tens of thousands of mostly male protesters without covering her face. Activists say police killed her brother Arman, who had encouraged her, in February 2019, and the authorities say he died of natural causes. [19] Gulalai Ismail, who with her sister Saba founded the girls' rights group Aware Girls, was held for more than a day in February 2019 and banned from travelling abroad, and her organisation was shut down. [19] "It seems that the state actors are most afraid of women," she said. [19]

The army's spokesman Asif Ghafoor called the movement non-violent and invited it to join the state in rebuilding the former tribal districts, while the authorities also accused it of working for foreign powers. [19] Women's part in it is agreed. What the movement stands for is disputed between its supporters and the state.

Afghanistan since 2021

The Taliban government's rules on women since August 2021 are set out in Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021. In brief: girls were turned away from secondary school in March 2022, and women were barred from universities in December that year. [28, 29] Within a week the authorities reportedly ordered aid groups to stop employing women. [5] UNESCO said in August 2026 that about 2.4 million girls were barred from secondary school, 200,000 more than a year before, and that the number could approach four million by 2030. [28] It added that Afghanistan is the only country that bars girls and women from secondary schools and universities. [28]

The Taliban's own account is that this is temporary. Their spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told SBS Pashto in June 2023 that "it has been postponed for some time", that there was "a work in progress", and that he feared a "strong backlash from some opposition and the vast majority of people" if schools reopened. [23] The women the programme spoke to doubted him. [23]

Criticism has come from inside the Taliban's circle too. In April 2023 the scholar Abdul Rahman Abid told the Associated Press: "My daughter is absent from school, I am ashamed, I have no answer for my daughter." [24] Toryali Himat, a scholar who is a Taliban member, said "my personal opinion is that girls should get education up to university level". [24] In January 2025 the acting deputy foreign minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai told a gathering in Khost: "Our expectation from the leaders of the Islamic Emirate is to open the doors of education. There is no excuse for this." He said the policy stemmed "from personal attitudes, not Shariah". [25] Later that month Taliban intelligence arrested Mawlavi Abdul Aziz Shuja, a cleric who had said at a Kabul press conference that Quranic teachings are not exclusive to men. [26] In December 2025 clerics of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam meeting in Karachi under Maulana Fazlur Rehman said depriving girls of education "has no justification in Islam". [27]

Inside Afghanistan women teach in secret. Pashtana Durrani was born in 1997 in a refugee camp in Pakistan; her family is from Kandahar, and in 2016 they returned to a camp at Spin Boldak where there was no school. [29] In 2018 she founded Learn Afghanistan, which ran 18 digital schools in the south when the Taliban took power. [29] She says officials of the previous government mocked her request for a school: "you people support the Taliban, and you want education, you can't learn." [29] Since 2021 she asks village elders first. They "give us the spaces, and they introduce the women as teachers, and they drop their daughters at the schools. But they protect their daughters." [29]

Matiullah Wesa's PenPath, a network of about 3,000 volunteers that worked with religious scholars and tribal elders to open village schools, lost its founder to Taliban intelligence on 27 March 2023. He was released on 26 October after a court found no evidence for the allegation. [6]