PAKISTAN’S export economy runs on women’s work. Walk through a stitching unit in Faisalabad or a cotton field in southern Punjab and this is obvious. Yet open the audit reports, supplier scorecards and compliance files that govern access to our largest export markets and the women largely disappear: present in the aggregate headcount, absent from the wage data, the grievance logs, the risk assessments. For decades this invisibility was commercially convenient. It is now becoming a commercial liability.

The reason is a quiet shift in how our buyers are regulated. The European Union, which takes roughly a third of Pakistan’s exports under GSP-Plus preferences, adopted its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive in 2024. Brussels narrowed its scope this March. Some have read that as a reprieve; it’s not: the companies still covered, above 5,000 employees and 1.5 billion in turnover, are precisely the brands ordering from Pakistan, and will comply by pushing questionnaires down the chain. The directive does not treat risk as gender-neutral. The OECD, whose framework underpins it, is blunt in a new case study on gender in supply chains: gendered harms are systemic, informal and often invisible, and due diligence that does not........

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