The recent case involving the Vice Chancellor of the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Sciences & Technology (FUUAST), Dr Zabta Khan Shinwari, has exposed an uncomfortable but persistent truth: Pakistan’s academic culture continues to police and punish women who refuse to conform to societal expectations of subservience. 

The Federal Ombudsperson’s declaration that his remarks constitute workplace harassment is not just a verdict on one man’s behaviour. It is an indictment of a wider, deeply ingrained prejudice that shadows women throughout their careers. 

The penalties imposed may be minor, but the cultural rot they expose is immense.

From childhood to adulthood, the stereotype of the “placable woman” hangs over Pakistani society like an unchallenged decree. Girls are instructed, in both explicit and silent ways, to remain agreeable, soft-spoken and deferential. 

Assertiveness, independence and professional confidence are traits that are encouraged in boys and tolerated in men, but viewed as aberrations in women. 

A woman who pushes back, speaks firmly, or simply refuses to be patronised is branded loud, aggressive, or as the Vice Chancellor labelled his colleague, “unstable.” 

These labels are not harmless descriptors; they function as weapons that delegitimise women’s presence in spaces that have historically been dominated by men.

In academia, where ideas and intellect should theoretically transcend gender, the prejudice takes on a more insidious form. 

A male professor who displays authority is respected; a female professor displaying the same authority is accused of creating discomfort. 

When Dr Shinwari attributed women’s assertiveness to “hormonal issues” for those over 35, he wasn’t merely making a crude remark. He was echoing a centuries-old tactic used to silence women by medicalising their behaviour. 

Reducing a woman’s professional conduct to her biology is an old and familiar strategy: one that allows institutions to dismiss her arguments without engaging with their substance.

The lecturer who filed the complaint did not just face disparagement; she faced the weight of an academic power structure that normalises such remarks. 

When the head of an institution publicly characterises professional women as hormonally unstable, he is not speaking in isolation. 

He is reinforcing a worldview that students absorb, colleagues internalise, and junior faculty learn to navigate in silence. 

In academia, where senior figures shape culture, such remarks metastasise into norms. They dictate who gets heard, whose work gets recognised and who is deemed “fit” for leadership roles.

The global context underscores how entrenched this prejudice is. 

A study by Women of Influence+ found that nearly 80% of women worldwide face age-related discrimination. 

Similarly, a UC Berkeley professor’s research revealed that while male professors receive consistent evaluations throughout their careers, women’s professional standing declines sharply after their 30s. 

They are judged not for their scholarship but for their perceived warmth or lack thereof. 

Once again, the preference is unmistakable. Women are expected to be nurturing, motherly and emotionally available. Competence, if expressed without that veneer of softness, is treated as arrogance.

Pakistan’s academic environment magnifies these biases even more sharply. Ageism and sexism merge into a single, suffocating expectation, that women must not only excel in their work but also perform emotional labour for the comfort of their colleagues. 

A woman who does not provide warmth is labelled difficult. A woman who asserts professional boundaries is viewed as abrasive. A woman who prioritises expertise over caregiving is marked as a threat. 

In this cultural equation, intelligence alone is never enough; it must be wrapped in palatability to be accepted.

The remarks made by the Vice Chancellor did not arise out of a vacuum. They reflect a mindset that has long shaped Pakistan’s professional spaces. 

In many institutions, women, even highly educated ones, are treated as auxiliary presences whose primary role is to maintain harmony rather than contribute intellectually. 

Their failures are magnified; their successes are scrutinised; their confidence is reframed as confrontation. 

Age becomes another convenient tool of dismissal: younger women are infantilised, older women medicalised. The message remains constant. Women must not disrupt established hierarchies.

The effect of this culture ripples far beyond university offices and faculty meetings. Institutions are not merely workplaces; they are power centres that mould the attitudes of thousands of students. 

When a senior academic dismisses a woman’s professional behaviour as hormonal instability, he broadcasts a lesson to every young person on campus: that men’s authority is intellectual, while women’s behaviour is biological. 

Such messaging travels silently but powerfully, shaping how future generations treat their female peers, subordinates and leaders.

This dynamic does not remain confined to academia. The same stereotypes shadow women in every secto; from corporations to public service to journalism. 

The expectation of placability, the insistence on warmth, the weaponisation of age, the pathologising of assertiveness all converge into a societal framework that habitually penalises women who choose to be more than background characters in male-dominated spaces.

What makes the case of Dr Shinwari especially telling is its ordinariness. These are not the remarks of an outlier; they are the everyday vocabulary of gendered policing disguised as concern or professionalism. 

The only difference here is that the comments were caught in an official complaint. 

Most women do not have the recourse, the institutional support, or the professional security to challenge such remarks. Many simply absorb them, adjust their behaviour and continue working in systems built to undermine them.

The Ombudsperson’s ruling may have formally acknowledged the harassment, but it does nothing to address the cultural roots that made such harassment possible. 

A minor penalty for the head of an academic institution sends a message of its own: that the issue is administrative, not systemic; that harassment is reducible to inappropriate comments rather than embedded prejudice; that accountability can be symbolic rather than transformative.

Sexism and ageism in academia do not operate as standalone prejudices; they intersect to reinforce a broader societal disdain for assertive women. 

The discomfort that assertive women provoke is not rooted in their behaviour but in the threat they pose to structures built on compliance. 

The biases that shape academic culture reflect a deeper unwillingness to accept women as equal intellectual participants, not adjunct emotional support, not background warmth, but authorities in their own right.

In Pakistan, as in many parts of the world, an assertive woman is still seen as a disruption. And the institutions that shape minds and futures, the very places where such biases should be challenged, often become the strongest enforcers of the status quo.

The case at FUUAST does not reveal a crack in the system; it reveals the system itself.

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