By Shimaila Matri Dawood
Lose the man, climb the ladder… but is the price paid worth it?
A reception is held in honour of the regional chief of a multinational company. A succession of Pakistan’s high-profile corporate kings, minus their socialite wives, are in attendance. As usual, she walks in alone, head held high. Mingling effortlessly with the crowd, she laughs politely, tells a joke, moves on, makes a deal, and renews a few professional contacts. They see her as poised and elegant, and at 40-something, decidedly attractive. The clock strikes nine, she gathers her purse, and walks herself to her car. Flash forward a few hours: she’s curled up on a sofa, being interviewed. There’s the inevitable question: “Why don’t you find a man?” “Do I need one?” she answers, quick-on-the-ball. “Besides,” she adds, in her most private admission, “even if I was interested in marrying again, at my age, every man worth my time is either married or intimidated by my independence. I’m not the sort of person who’ll have an affair with a married man, and I’m not willing to play mother to a grown man’s insecurities.”
Power, they say, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. There certainly are enough examples to prove it. Mustafa Khar’s umpteen wives. Imran Khan and his legions of enamoured socialites – both sides of the colonial/native divide. And more recently, Shahbaz Sharif and the former feudal lord’s wife, Ms. Durrani. After all, ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Though Austin wrote that 200 years ago, little has changed since.
But what about powerful Pakistani women?
Do they remain in want of a husband?
If a sample survey of executive posts in companies across Pakistan is anything to go by (see chart), many of Pakistan’s women movers and shakers are unmarried. At Glaxo Smith Kline, for example, half or more of the women in senior management positions are single. It’s the same story at Hum TV, Unilever, Novartis, PICIC and Shell. And these figures do not include the number of divorcees.
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