Beyond the Breadwinner

Rethinking Matrimonial Property and Women’s Rights in Pakistan

The Islamabad High Court’s ruling that all assets acquired during marriage are jointly held “matrimonial property” is a moment of quiet revolution in Pakistani jurisprudence. Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani’s declaration that domestic labour is a measurable economic contribution cuts against decades of statutory silence by placing the homemaker on equal legal footing with the “money earner”. Yet to read this judgment only as legal progress is to miss its deeper indictment:

Pakistani women have long been dispossessed not by accident, but by design.

The case of Amara Waqas is instructive precisely because of how ordinary it is. As an Air Force officer, she was still unable to prove ownership of assets she had materially contributed to. Before this writ, an appellate court stripped her of even a 30 percent share of her own dowry on a technicality, what feminist legal scholars call the “neutrality trap”: laws framed without gender bias that nonetheless produce profoundly gendered outcomes when applied to structurally unequal circumstances.

The data context is relevant here; In Pakistan, only 2% of women own land despite 70% working in agriculture, and the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey found that 98% of married women hold no property whatsoever. Customarily, women carry disproportionate shares of unpaid domestic and care work. Women perform 76.2% of all unpaid care work and spend 4.2 hours daily on it, compared to 1.7 hours contributed by men globally. Financially, the gender inclusion gap stood at 34% as recently as December 2023. The IHC’s ruling begins to name that invisibility for what it is: a form of structural dispossession.

The court’s comparative jurisprudence is well-grounded in Islamic law. Malaysia and Indonesia have embedded similar protections within Islamic law through the harta sepencarian doctrine, dismantling the claim that property equality contradicts Islamic jurisprudence. Justice Kayani also correctly cited Surah Al-Baqarah and Surah Al-Ahzab by reinstating the fact that Islam has never prohibited legislation protecting women’s property rights, rather, the contrary. Pakistan’s own CEDAW ratification obliges the state to eliminate property-based discrimination under Article 16, an obligation the CEDAW Committee reiterated in its 2020 Concluding Observations on Pakistan. Nearly three decades after ratification, no comprehensive legislative framework for matrimonial property distribution exists. The Family Courts Act, the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, and the Nikahnama together represent a patchwork that protects women’s formal rights in theory while leaving enforcement toothless in practice.

Thus, the court’s recommendations to make the Nikahnama column mandating equal property division and to formally educate on Column 18 rights are practical. Column 18 has long offered women a mechanism to stipulate divorce rights. Extending its architecture to cover property is both logistically feasible and culturally legible. Similarly, the recommendation to educate girls about their Nikahnama-based rights reflects an understanding: “legal reform without legal literacy is merely symbolic”.

What the judgment cannot accomplish alone is the transformation of the structural conditions that make women economically vulnerable in marriage in the first place. According to Pakistan’s 2017 census and subsequent household surveys, women own less than three percent of agricultural land and a similarly marginal share of formal property. Financial inclusion remains sharply gendered: the Karandaaz Financial Inclusion survey suggests that women constitute around 14 percent of bank account holders. In this context, even an equitable matrimonial property regime will benefit primarily women who have assets to divide and will leave the most economically marginalised women, those in rural areas or informal labour, still outside its protections.

It exposes a legal and social architecture that has long treated women’s domestic labour and property rights insignificantly, a fiction that benefits those who enjoy the labour while refusing to compensate for it. Thus, it is a foot in the right direction, but needs to be coupled with literacy, enforcement, and cultural evolution.