- Fafen analysis shows 72% female MNAs’ items focus national policy
- Constituency issues account 18%, gender-specific legislation represents only 6%
- Female MNAs engage broad spectrum, not limited gender-specific matters.
ISLAMABAD: Female legislators play a growing role in shaping parliamentary proceedings, advancing the national agenda with effectiveness, The News reported on Tuesday.
During the second parliamentary year of the 16th National Assembly, women MNAs submitted 1,206 agenda items — a striking demonstration of independent legislative initiative.
Analysis by the Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen) further underscores the depth of this engagement, revealing that 72% of these items focused on core national policy areas, including economic policy, taxation, national security, and governance — domains traditionally perceived as male-dominated. Constituency and local issues accounted for 18%, while gender-specific legislation accounted for only 6%.
Fafen developed a subject-matter typology specifically to test whether female MNAs’ agenda is disproportionately concentrated on gender-specific issues. Each agenda item is coded against a set of policy categories — national policy, constituency issues, gender-specific, and procedural/cross-cutting — based on the content of the item as recorded in the Orders of the Day and verbatim proceedings.
The coding was carried out using official National Assembly records for the period March 1, 2025 to February 28, 2026. Parliamentary effectiveness is measured not only by the volume of participation but also by its range. A member who engages only with a narrow set of issues, however important, has a more limited legislative footprint than one who engages with the full spectrum of national policy.
According to Fafen’s analysis of the second parliamentary year of the National Assembly, the assumption that female MNAs in Pakistan focus on women’s rights and social welfare to the exclusion of other policy areas is widespread in public discourse; however, the data do not support this. Female MNAs raised economic policy, security issues, taxation, and parliamentary procedure in proportions far exceeding their engagement with gender-specific legislation.
This subject-matter breadth is evidence that women in Pakistan’s parliament are not niche legislators. They are engaging with the same policy questions as their male colleagues, in addition to — not instead of — legislation that directly addresses women’s rights and social protection.
