What nine years of Pakistan civil awards look like when you turn them into data

Every August, on the eve of Independence Day, the Cabinet Division announces the year’s Pakistan Civil Awards. The following March, on Pakistan Day, they are conferred. In between, the lists circulate in the media for a day or two, read name by name, and then they pass out of view. Each announcement is accompanied by a document, complete in itself but rarely looked at again.

Placed one after another, nine of these documents become something a single one can never be: a dataset. The awards from 2018 through 2026 amount to 2,209 individual recognitions. Coded consistently, recipient by recipient, along a few dimensions, they can be counted, sorted and compared. What follows is a description of the patterns that emerge from that exercise. None of it is a claim about intention or cause. Rather, the aim is to set out what becomes visible once a public record is assembled into a structured whole, and to leave the interpretation, for the most part, open.The lists have grown, and they do not grow smoothlyThe first thing the series reveals is its own scale. The annual lists run from 73 names in 2018 to 372 in 2026, and the path rises and falls: 73, 116, 185, 125, 255, a large 416 in 2023, a sharply smaller 105 in 2024, then 263 and 372. The 2023 total sets aside a separate, one-time group of 299 health workers recognized after the pandemic, kept apart throughout this analysis so that a single extraordinary event does not distort the underlying trend.

Against that shifting volume, the useful questions concern what stays constant and what moves. As the lists expanded, the plurality category in any given year changed hands repeatedly, from engineering in 2021, to arts and culture in 2022, to public service across 2023 to 2025, to gallantry in 2026. The pie did not simply grow. Its slices were recut, year by year.Women: one figure, many cuts

Of everything the data holds, the most stable number is the share of awards going to women, and it is stable in a way that merits a closer look.

Counting only Pakistani and overseas-Pakistani recipients, so that foreign honorees do not distort the picture, women make up between roughly 10 and 16 percent of recipients in every single year from 2018 to 2026. The proportion does not trend upward or downward across the nine years—it holds. This is notable because the lists themselves change size so dramatically. The 2023 list was more than five times the length of the 2024 list, yet the female share barely differed between them. A number that steady, across lists of such different sizes, is itself a finding worth pausing on.

One natural thought is that gallantry awards, which tend to follow military and police service, might be doing the work. Setting them aside entirely, the pooled female share across all nine years rises only from about 12 to 14 percent. Therefore, the pattern is not the artifact of one category. It runs through the civilian awards as well.

Yet that single figure of roughly 12 percent is, on inspection, not one number but an average of very different ones. Pooling all nine years and looking inside each field, the range is wide. In engineering, women received 2 of 126 awards. In gallantry, 8 of 345. Move to other domains and the picture inverts: in social welfare women take about 40 percent of awards, in arts and culture close to a quarter, with education, science, sport and information technology sitting in the high teens to low twenties. The headline share, in other words, conceals a strong field structure, a near-absence in some areas and a substantial presence in others, averaging out to something that looks unremarkable and hides the variation entirely. Which fields, one might ask, would........

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