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There is a crisis unfolding quietly in some of Pakistan’s poorest households. We rarely talk about it because, in many cases, there is no divorce certificate or court case to announce it.
I keep meeting women whose husbands have simply left. Some left for younger women. Others remarried and stopped supporting their first families. Some simply disappeared – from their wives’ lives and from their responsibilities.
What remains is a woman with children to feed, little or no education, few employable skills and no independent income. Many end up cleaning and cooking in other people’s homes just to survive.
Pakistan does talk about divorce, but much of the debate centres on rising divorce and khula cases, particularly among urban and educated families. Women’s education, careers and financial independence also sometimes enter this conversation as explanations for marital breakdown – as though empowering women destabilises families.
The women I meet tell a very different story. Their crisis was never that they became too independent. It is that they were never given the chance to become independent at all.
Pakistan’s 2023 Census shows how easily these women can disappear statistically. Just 0.48% of women aged 15 and above are recorded as divorced and 0.16% as separated. But where is the woman who remains legally married while her husband has vanished, remarried elsewhere or simply stopped providing?
On paper, she is married. In reality, she is raising her children alone.
The economic ground she stands on is already stacked against her. Pakistan’s Labour Force Survey 202425 puts female labour-force participation at just 22.7%, compared with 68.7% for men. For women with little education, domestic work may be one of very few options. The ILO estimates that Pakistan has at least 8.5 million domestic workers, the vast majority women and young girls.
Even when women find paid work, inequality follows them. An ILO study published in 2025 found women in wage employment earning approximately 2530% less than men, with the gap widening to around 40% in the informal economy. Meanwhile, the 2023 Census puts female literacy at 52.84%, compared with 68% for men.
So when a woman with little education is abandoned, she isn’t just losing a relationship. She may be losing her family’s principal income while entering a labour market with no qualifications, digital skills, savings or knowledge of her rights. Pakistani law does provide routes to maintenance. Under the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, a wife whose husband fails to maintain her adequately can seek maintenance. Family Courts also have jurisdiction over maintenance, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that a mother’s lack of financial means does not shift a father’s responsibility to maintain his child.
But a legal right and the ability to exercise it are two different things. Imagine navigating a Family Court when you struggle to read, cannot afford repeated travel, do not know where your husband is living or cannot spare a day’s wages because that day’s wages buy your children’s dinner. That is where law, poverty and literacy collide. We need accessible legal aid, faster enforcement of maintenance orders and mechanisms that make it harder for fathers to disappear financially.
But we also need to act earlier. Girls’ education and women’s economic empowerment are not just development aspirations, they are forms of protection. Every girl should leave education and be able to earn. Women need financial and digital literacy, bank accounts, marketable skills and knowledge of their rights to maintenance, inheritance and property.
Pakistan also urgently needs better data. How many women are legally married but effectively heading households alone? How many receive maintenance? Until we count them, they remain invisible.
The women I meet don’t speak in the language of gender indicators. Their explanation is painfully simple: he left, the children remained, and I had to find a way to feed them.
It is time our laws, policies and national conversation truly saw them.
