Pakistan ranks 145 out of 146 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index for economic participation and opportunity and is estimated to have only about 24–25% of women who are economically active or employed. It could be said that you have to be the unluckiest woman in Pakistan to be working in male-dominated fields; however, at such an abysmal workforce participation rate, every field for women in Pakistan is unsurprisingly a male-dominated field.
Forget workplace harassment for a moment (not really though, but for now, humour me), and look at this figure: 1 in 3 women in Pakistan has faced sexual harassment of some form, and a mere discussion of this figure at my current workplace led me to almost 4 out of 5 female colleagues recounting stories of this likeness too. This also includes me. As for workplace harassment, studies (including reports from Gallup Pakistan and regional labour research) estimate that up to 70%–93% of women in various surveyed urban and rural work sectors have encountered workplace sexual harassment or unwanted sexual attention. These figures are real women with real lives, personalities, problems and aspirations who consistently, for too long, have faced a terrible choice: if she speaks out, the man responsible might be investigated, but even then she still risks losing her job and wider employment rights, while he just gets a slap on the wrist.
The problem, as I see it, is twofold. Firstly, women are still facing harassment, abuse and even sexual assault at the workplace. The second problem is that such abuse often only comes to light when women themselves speak up, even though doing so can put their wellbeing and careers at risk. Many women do not want to take the formal route. For things to change, women, particularly those in junior positions, should not have to choose between speaking out against senior male colleagues and protecting their professional growth and future prospects.
This now leads me to the recent ruling from the Federal Constitutional
Court (FCC) in a sexual workplace harassment case where a National
Bank of Pakistan employee (Ms. Nadia Sarwar) reported two senior colleagues (Aqeel Abbas and Usman Shahid) for sexual harassment in 2013.
The Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act 2010 states that, as per S2(h), harassment amounts to: “any unwelcome sexual advance, request for sexual favours, stalking or cyber stalking or other verbal, visual or written communication or physical conduct of a sexual nature or sexually demeaning attitudes, including any gestures or expression conveying derogatory connotation causing interference with work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment, or the attempt to punish the complainant for refusal to comply to such a request or is made a condition for employment.”
Ms. Nadia alleged that the respondents subjected her to a sustained pattern of harassment. According to her, one of them threatened to tear off her clothes if she wore loose clothing, while another drew a sketch of private body parts and asked her to name them. She stated that they repeatedly mocked her for being single and pressed her with personal questions about whether she had a boyfriend. She further alleged that they misused their authority by making her stay at work after hours, made adverse remarks about her performance, and directed shameful, unethical, scandalous, immoral and un-Islamic comments at her. Ms. Nadia also stated that, coming from a respectable family, she did her best to avoid the respondents and made it clear to them that she was not the kind of girl they took her to be. When she refused their advances outright, Usman Shahid responded: “I will say such statements/words and if you have any problem with it you may leave the job.” She complained twice within the bank hierarchy: first to the divisional head and then to the president of the bank, who neither took action nor conducted an inquiry. She subsequently complained to the Federal Ombudsman, won the case, and a major penalty under the Act was imposed: compulsory retirement. The Act allows the president to pardon, which ended up happening as he partially pardoned the perpetrators and reduced the penalty to a censure, which, in light of the harassment that occurred, seems like a very sick joke.
Let’s now revert to the original definition as per the Act. Does all of this not amount to actual, intense workplace sexual harassment? FCC spent a whole page defining “sexual”, but it never checked whether the conduct in this case itself was and conveniently forgot to apply the very definition to the facts.
The FCC recognises that the Act exists to protect dignity and secure a safe working environment, but then confines the statutory concept to a considerably more limited operation. In effect, the Court has treated “sexual” as though it were principally a matter of sexual gratification or intimate physical conduct, when workplace harassment often operates through gendered humiliation, sexualised language, abuse of authority and retaliation, none of which fits neatly within so restrictive a conception.
What this does is that it raises the bar for every victim, as the FCC now wants “impartial, credible material” reinforced with “convincing/independent evidence”, meanwhile warning that too many allegations make a complaint less credible. Although harassment like this rarely happens in front of witnesses, Ms. Nadia had two anyways who separately backed her claims. She won her case in Islamabad High Court, which found that the Bank had itself failed to comply with the statutory machinery designed to protect the complainant. The inquiry committee was improperly constituted, the prescribed timeline was not followed, and the Bank’s supposed findings were never properly produced; indeed, the IHC observed that the Bank’s own material did not establish any lawful inquiry outcome.
Yet the litigation that followed became heavily preoccupied with the consequences of the complainant’s evolving account, and there is something backwards about that. The sequence is telling: the employer fails to put in place the mechanism the law requires, the complainant is forced to escalate her grievance elsewhere, her account naturally develops as the evidence is gathered, and those later details are then treated with suspicion. This risks rewarding institutional non-compliance. The employer failed to provide the very mechanism contemplated by the Act, and it is the complainant who ends up bearing a share of the evidentiary consequences of that failure.
After the 27th Amendment, the FCC has been said to be the one to decide in cases with questions of law, and it’s binding on all courts, including the Supreme Court. In 2021, the Supreme Court stated in Nadia Naz and another vs. The President of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Islamabad and others that harassment must be sexual to count, after which Parliament amended the law in 2022 to state harassment “may or may not” be sexual in nature, after which the Nadia Naz judgement was overturned, and the
Supreme Court further confirmed this amended definition twice more in
Raja Tanveer Safdar Vs. Mrs. Tehmina Yasmeen and others and Muhammad Din Vs. Province of Punjab through Secretary Population Welfare, Lahore and others.
Ignoring this legislative and judicial development, the FCC applied a narrow definition for harassment. This raises a striking rule-of-law question: what happens when two apex courts develop competing interpretations of the same rights-protective statute? In Nadia Sarwar, the answer carries real consequences, because the FCC’s reading threatens to narrow the practical reach of a workplace protection law at precisely the moment when earlier Supreme Court jurisprudence had been moving towards a broader understanding of harassment and dignity.
What emerges, then, is a clash of judicial philosophies. The Supreme Court’s line of authority is built around dignity, gender, the hostile working environment and the broader goal of workplace protection. The FCC, by contrast, insists on textual fidelity to the word “sexual” in section 2(h) and resists what it regards as judicial enlargement of the statute. For those the Act was meant to protect, the difference between these two visions is anything but academic. For a court on this level to make such a decision for a segment of society that is already so marginalised and vulnerable, indicating significant oversight, the implications are far greater.
Ms. Nadia has been fighting this case for 13 years. The outcome is censure. It is difficult to imagine a worse message to send to women in Pakistan’s workplaces, particularly at a time when confidence in institutional protections for women matters more than ever. When a court whose interpretation binds every other court, including the Supreme Court, narrows the protection afforded by a workplace-rights statute, the question is no longer only whether one woman received justice. It is what the law will now mean for every woman who comes after her. Every woman after this precedent, while recovering from the mental implications of being harassed at her workplace, will ask herself one question first: to speak or not to speak?
