Developing a contextual understanding of empowerment through education: narratives from highly educated women in Pakistan

Current international discourse foregrounds gender parity in education as a means of empowering women in societies with strong adherence to traditional gender norms, such as Pakistan. This discourse contends that women's access to higher education and subsequent employment enables them to identify and reject traditional cultural values and norms. However, some scholars criticise the gender parity approach as portraying a simplistic narrative that fails to recognise the social, cultural, and family contexts within which women are embedded. Drawing on an ecological approach, this article examines how education and empowerment are experienced by highly educated women in Pakistan with a particular focus on these contexts. Our findings demonstrate that education and employment are often experienced as disempowering due to their reinforcement of traditional gender roles and values. However, we also found that women move iteratively between acquiescing to traditional gender norms and pushing the boundaries of acceptable practice through this acquiescence. Our findings demonstrate that for the women in our study, empowerment was experienced through their ability to strike a delicate balance between compliance with traditional customs and the pursuit of opportunities that opened because of this compliance.