Why gender laws need follow-up

In recent years, Pakistan has seen the passage of several progressive laws aimed at safeguarding women’s rights, laws that promise protection against violence, harassment at the workplace, equal participation and access to property. Yet, despite these well-intentioned efforts, a troubling question remains: why do these laws not translate into real-world impact for most Pakistani women?

This disconnect between legislation and reality has less to do with drafting flaws and more to do with what happens, or rather, what does not happen after the bill becomes law. In Pakistan, the legislative journey usually ends with the passage of a law. Once enacted, most laws are celebrated and shelved, rarely revisited, barely scrutinised and seldom improved. There is no structured mechanism to ask the most important question: ‘Is this law working?’

This legislative inertia is not limited to parliament alone. Ministries such as the Ministry of Law and Justice and regulatory bodies like the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) often lack a structured feedback mechanism to track the downstream impact of legal reforms. Without inter-institutional coordination and feedback loops, implementation gaps persist across the board.

Post-legislative scrutiny is a powerful yet underutilised tool that allows parliaments to assess the implementation and effectiveness of laws after they have been enacted. Even more critically, when done through a gender lens, post-legislative scrutiny helps us determine whether men and women are affected differently, whether some groups remain excluded, and whether the law inadvertently reinforces structural inequalities. It allows us to measure not just what a law says but what it does.

International democracy foundations define gender-sensitive post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) as a process that ensures laws do not inadvertently disadvantage women or perpetuate unequal outcomes. This approach pushes parliaments to move beyond rhetoric and into the realm of results, demanding evidence-based, data-driven answers about how the law functions in practice, especially for those on the margins.

Pakistan’s legislative history provides compelling examples of why this is needed. Consider the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act (2010). While the law mandates inquiry committees and complaint procedures, its implementation in the informal sector, where most women work, remains virtually non-existent.

Similarly, the domestic violence acts passed across several provinces have yet to deliver meaningful protection. Shelters remain under-resourced, law enforcement remains untrained and public awareness is painfully limited. Without any formal review, we continue assuming these laws work simply because they exist.

Other examples abound: maternity benefits that fail to reach home-based workers, inheritance rights ignored in rural districts and quotas in public service that are undermined by workplace culture. These are not failures of legislation alone; they are failures of feedback, follow-up and accountability.

Around the world, countries have begun to fix this problem. The UK’s Women and Equalities Committee regularly undertakes reviews of key legislation, identifying policy gaps and recommending improvements. Uganda’s parliament evaluated maternal health outcomes through post-legislative scrutiny and revised laws accordingly. Indonesia reviewed its laws on gender-based violence and, through structured inquiry and public hearings, improved implementation standards. These parliaments asked the hard questions and acted on the answers.

In Pakistan, the challenge of post-legislative scrutiny is compounded by the legacy of the 18th Amendment. While devolution rightly transferred legislative and administrative powers to provinces, it did not adequately equip provincial legislatures with technical capacity to evaluate laws, particularly from a gender lens. Provincial assemblies in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan have yet to institutionalise systematic review mechanisms, leaving implementation unmonitored at the local level.

So why has Pakistan not caught up? There are four major structural barriers. First, our parliamentary committees lack mandates to review laws after they’re passed. The Rules of Procedure do not formally task them with scrutiny or review. Second, committees are often under-resourced and overstretched, with minimal staff or research support. Third, there’s a severe shortage of sex-disaggregated data. Our ministries and departments rarely collect or share data by gender, making it difficult to assess differential impact. And fourth, there is little formal engagement between parliament and civil society, cutting off valuable insight from gender experts and grassroots organisations.

But all is not lost. There is now growing recognition among lawmakers, donors and policy practitioners that post-legislative scrutiny must become a permanent feature of our democratic infrastructure especially if we are serious about achieving gender equality.

We must start by amending the Rules of Procedure of the National Assembly and provincial assemblies to embed post-legislative scrutiny as a standard committee function. Committees must be empowered to revisit laws after two to three years of enactment, with a specific lens on gender. The Women’s Parliamentary Caucus can champion this reform and act as an anchor for gender-focused scrutiny.

In this context, the Special Committee on Gender Mainstreaming, constituted in the National Assembly, offers a timely and promising platform. This committee is already mandated to examine policy and legislative measures from a gender perspective. Its work can be expanded to lead structured post-legislative reviews of laws affecting women and marginalised groups. With the proper technical and research support, it can play a pivotal role in bridging the gap between gender equality in law and in practice.

The Parliamentary Research Wing must also be capacitated with analysts trained in gender audits, legal impact evaluations, and data science. The Senate and National Assembly’s Research Centre should be tasked with producing annual Gender Impact Reports. And most importantly, civil society and academia, including think tanks, must be institutionalised as research and technical partners.

We should begin with a few pilot cases: reviewing the Domestic Violence Acts, the Workplace Harassment Act and the Women’s Property Rights Act. These reviews can generate the political momentum needed to build systems and standards for broader PLS across the board.

Of course, institutionalising scrutiny is not without its challenges. Lawmakers may resist oversight of legislation they have sponsored, while ministries might fear exposure to implementation failures. Overcoming this will require political will, leadership within Parliament, and a culture that sees scrutiny not as critique, but as course correction.

As a policymaker and researcher, I firmly believe that gender-sensitive post-legislative scrutiny is not an optional governance tool; it is a constitutional necessity. Article 25(2) of the constitution prohibits discrimination based on sex, while Article 34 mandates the state to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life. Together, these constitutional principles make it imperative for parliament to assess whether laws are serving women equitably in both intent and impact.

Pakistan’s international commitments further reinforce this constitutional obligation. As a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goals 5 and 16, the country is bound to create transparent, inclusive, and accountable legislative systems. Gender-sensitive scrutiny is a global responsibility.

Equality cannot be measured by legal text alone. It must be assessed by outcomes: who benefits, who is harmed and who is forgotten.

With a two-thirds majority in parliament and a declared intent to reform governance, the current political leadership has a golden opportunity to introduce this much-needed reform. It is time to stop counting laws and start measuring justice. The real success of a law lies not in its passage, but in its performance. And that performance must be judged by how well it serves the most vulnerable, especially women.

The legitimacy of any democracy depends not only on making laws but on making laws that work for everyone. Parliament owes its citizens rights-based legislation and also the assurance that such rights are realised. Gender-sensitive PLS can be that assurance. In the end, a law that does not work for women is a law that does not work at all.

The writer is associated with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad. The article does not necessarily represent the views of the organisation.

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Originally published in The News