Role of Women Lgislatures in The Legislative History of Pakistan

Abstract

The role of Women legislatures in the legislative history of Pakistan has either been misunderstood or undermined in the society. This paper outlines the role of Women Parliamentarians in the history of Pakistani politics and legislation to see, how the women have evolved through the societal pressures and discriminatory hurdles. Our research Objective was to fill in the gap that currently prevails in literature on women parliamentarian’s contributions in Pakistan’s legislative framework at national level. This research paper is first of its kind providing with efficiency model that calculates individuals, annual and era-wise efficiencies of women parliamentarians. The ‘per year per head ‘cost as compared to the efficiency of the parliamentarian is one to worry about. Qualitative as well as quantitative methods have been used to calculate their efficiency; various factors affecting the performance of women parliamentarians have been analyzed. We have collected our data from primary and secondary sources like debate books (1947 – 2007) of national assembly, interview of parliamentarians and various articles and books. The purpose of our research was to validate whether “Women have efficiently contributed in legislative history of Pakistan” or not and whether “Women legislators are advocates of gender specific issues.” only. Overall quantitative results have calculated the efficiency to be very low i.e. 9.7%. However, qualitative results show that various factors affect the participation of women; authority, decision making power, reserve seats/general seats, social political factors, religious factors, acknowledgement of rights etc. Over the period of 60 years the efficiency has increased, from 1947-2007 and women participation has also increased.