The Leaking Pipeline: Why Pakistan’s Women Leave Tech After Graduation Pakistan produces thousands of female computer science graduates every year. Most of them will not be working in tech within five years of leaving campus.

Abstract

Walk into any computer science lecture hall at a Pakistani university today and you will find something that was unthinkable two decades ago: women, often in significant numbers, sometimes forming a majority in the room. Female enrolment in STEM programmes has grown steadily across public and private universities alike, driven by ambitious families, government laptop schemes, and the very visible financial success of Pakistan’s IT export sector. A degree in computing has become, for many middle-class Pakistani families, the most credible route for a daughter into a professional career with real income and social standing. The pipeline, in other words, has been built. What has not been built is what comes after it.

Pakistan ranks dead last — 146th out of 146 countries — in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2025. Only 22 percent of Pakistani women participate in the formal labour force, against 81 percent of men. In the tech sector specifically, women who graduate with computing degrees face a compound barrier: a professional environment that was not designed for their presence, a commute infrastructure that does not protect their safety, workplace cultures that normalise harassment, and family pressures that intensify the moment a woman tries to build a career rather than simply completing a degree. The result is a pipeline that fills at the university end and empties long before it reaches the part that matters — sustained, senior, economically meaningful participation in Pakistan’s tech economy.