Women parliamentarians are being treated unfairly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly as the male majority ignores the resolutions presented by them, discouraging and discriminating against lawmakers who represent 52 percent of the country’s population.
The speakers and other ministers also ignore the opinions and remarks of the female legislators, who have been deprived of their rights as elected representatives of the people. “The attitude of the male members is very discouraging and we are constantly being discriminated against,” Shazia Auranzeb of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz told Pakistan Today.
She quoted the example of Pakistan People’s Party’s member Noor Sahar’s walkout from her set because the speaker, Kirmat Ullah Khan Chargharmati was not listening to her, adding that members from the opposition also supported her. She said Noor only continued after her Parliamentary leader Abdul Akbar Khan ordered her to resume the set. “Women are already being underrepresented in the assembly and we, the lawmakers, should raise our voices if we want to be heard,” she said.
“We need to keep presenting resolutions which favour women, only then can we end this discrimination,” another female member of PML-N Advocate Mehar Sultana said, adding that all women should unite for the cause. She said she had grounded two bills in the assembly but they had been ignored and recently she had requested all female members to sign the Domestic Bill so that it is taken up in the assembly. She said the rights of the women needed to be defended well since in most areas of the province they were not even allowed to vote.
Another PPP member Faiza Rasheed said it had been a year since she had presented the Labour Law Bill but it still had not been picked up by the speaker, adding that she had not been given the floor even once in three years. ANP lawmaker Zubida Ihsan said women need to be made aware of their rights so that they could become constructive members of the society.
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