She Asked About the Job. They Asked About Her Husband's Family: Pakistan and New Zealand on Gender at Work

🇵🇰 Pakistan · 🇳🇿 New Zealand

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Karachi, a woman applying for a teaching job can expect an interview that drifts, unprompted, into questions about her in-laws and her cooking schedule. In Wellington, the pay gap between men and women has just narrowed to a record national low of 5.2 percent, according to Stats NZ, and the country's own Equal Opportunities Commissioner still describes workplace bias against women as a plain fact rather than a historical footnote. Neither country has solved this. They have simply arrived at two very different versions of the same unfinished business.

Do's & Don'ts

🇵🇰 Pakistan

🇳🇿 New Zealand

Pakistan

The numbers are stark before any anecdote enters the picture. The ILO's wage-gap research puts Pakistan's gender pay gap at 25 percent, with women earning roughly 30 percent less than men in equivalent work, and women make up only about 13.5 percent of the country's wage earners despite steadily rising female education levels, according to reporting on the same ILO findings. Hofstede Insights scores Pakistan at 50 on masculinity — a middling figure that undersells how unevenly that number plays out by sector, region, and individual employer, since the formal statistic sits alongside widely reported informal screening: job postings that specify "male only," and interviews that drift into marital and family territory well before any discussion of actual qualifications.

A first-person account published on ProPakistani by a woman who moved from Canada to Karachi captured this collision directly. Nasira Mazhar described encountering roughly a dozen job postings explicitly restricted to male candidates, and recounted an interview in which a female HR representative spent most of the conversation asking about her living arrangements, her in-laws, and cooking and cleaning expectations rather than her teaching qualifications — leaving her, in her own words, "dumfounded and confused" and unsure whether she was "applying for a teaching position or addressing a matrimonial inquiry." She was also offered remote work on the unprompted assumption that she would have "home expectations from my spouse and his family," despite having said she preferred to work in-office. Tellingly, she added that she had never encountered "blatant sexism" of that kind in Canada — and that she still believes equitable employers exist in Karachi, just that "they're not as visible as need be."

New Zealand

New Zealand's picture looks, on paper, considerably better, and in several real respects is. Stats NZ reported the national gender pay gap narrowing to a record low of 5.2 percent as of 2025, a figure cited approvingly by officials as proof of sustained progress, and Hofstede's numbers describe a broadly egalitarian culture overall: power distance of just 22, among the lowest Hofstede records, alongside a comparatively high individualism score of 79. New Zealand has also, at various points, been publicly ranked among the best countries globally for women in the workplace.

But the country's own institutional voices are notably blunt that the job isn't finished. In an interview with Global Women NZ, Equal Opportunities Commissioner Dr Karanina Sumeo stated plainly, "Yes, there is a bias in New Zealand's workplaces against women," adding that "Pacific women consistently have the lowest wages of any group in New Zealand in both the private and public sector" — a reminder that a strong national average can still mask uneven outcomes beneath it. She also pointed to a specific, structural mechanism behind the headline gap: "Women are often offered a role at the lower end of the pay scale when they start a role," meaning disparities compound from the very first negotiation, before performance or tenure ever enter the picture. Deloitte's Global Women in the Boardroom research, alongside repeated local commentary on the slow pace of women reaching executive and director roles, suggests the gap has simply moved further up the org chart rather than closing outright.

The Reckoning

The genuinely interesting contrast isn't that Pakistan has a problem and New Zealand doesn't — it's that the two countries have displaced the same underlying issue to opposite ends of a career. In Pakistan, the barrier shows up loudest at the front door: whether a woman is even permitted to apply, and whether an interview stays about the job or drifts into her marital status before she's hired at all. In New Zealand, the barrier shows up later and more quietly: in a starting salary pegged lower by default, in how slowly senior and board-level representation has moved despite decades of public commitment, and in wage gaps that persist specifically for Pacific women even as the national average improves.

Dr Sumeo's point about shared caregiving — "It is only when men can fully share caring responsibilities that women can achieve equality" — is worth taking seriously as a diagnostic for both countries, not just New Zealand's. Pakistan's informal screening around marital and family status is, in effect, an employer trying to pre-empt exactly the caregiving-and-career tension Sumeo describes, just handled through exclusion rather than policy; New Zealand has built the policy infrastructure — parental leave, published pay-gap reporting, public commissioners saying the quiet part out loud — without yet finishing the cultural work that infrastructure was meant to produce.

The two countries also differ in who is left to carry the burden of proof. In Pakistan, a woman who clears the hiring hurdle at all is often left to individually demonstrate, firm by firm, that she is the exception to a discouraging statistical picture. In New Zealand, the burden has shifted partway onto institutions — a named commissioner, published pay data, legally protected parental leave — but Sumeo's own framing makes clear that shifting the paperwork isn't the same as finishing the job, and plenty of individual negotiation still falls back onto the employee the moment an actual offer letter arrives.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

ProPakistani.pk (named first-person essay) — Nasira Mazhar, who relocated from Canada to Karachi, described being asked in a teaching-job interview about her in-laws, living arrangements, and cooking and cleaning responsibilities, saying she felt "dumfounded and confused" and left wondering whether she was "applying for a teaching position or addressing a matrimonial inquiry," despite having encountered no comparable "blatant sexism" during her career in Canada.

Global Women NZ (named interview) — New Zealand's Equal Opportunities Commissioner, Dr Karanina Sumeo, stated directly that bias against women persists in New Zealand workplaces, and specifically flagged that women are frequently offered lower starting pay bands than men from the very first job offer — a structural gap that compounds well before any performance review.

Conclusion

If you're a woman weighing these two postings, the practical question isn't "which country is better for women" in the abstract — it's which stage of the problem you're prepared to navigate. In Pakistan, that means scrutinizing the hiring process itself, and specific employers' reputations, before you accept anything. In New Zealand, it means negotiating your starting salary harder than the country's reputation might suggest you need to, and watching whether leadership actually diversifies over time or merely talks about doing so. Progress, in both places, is real and incomplete — the honest advice is to trust the data over the marketing in either direction.