For much of my professional life, I did not think of Female Agency as an academic concept. I encountered it first through people, institutions and responsibilities.
I grew up around women whose lives were shaped by work, family responsibility, education, social relationships and institutional circumstances. My mother was a university-educated professional working woman and a single parent. Her agency was not expressed through an abstract language of empowerment. It appeared in everyday decisions: working, managing resources, making choices, investing in education and creating conditions in which the next generation could have opportunities that might otherwise have been unavailable.
Only much later did I begin to understand that what I had experienced as ordinary life could also be understood as a process of capability formation. My intellectual interest in Female Agency began with a simple observation: capabilities do not develop in a social vacuum. They develop within environments. Family, schools, workplaces, public institutions, transport systems, financial arrangements, technologies and digital environments can all expand or constrain what a person is substantively able to know, do, choose, influence or become.
This realization became increasingly significant during my public-service career. For more than two decades, my work has taken me through different institutional environments within Pakistan’s public sector, including administrative, financial, judicial, regulatory and scientific-institutional settings. Working within and around these institutions changed the way I understood the relationship between individuals and systems.
I began to see that formal rights and formal opportunities are not necessarily the same as substantive capability. A right may exist without effective access. Access may exist without meaningful use. Use may exist without capability. And capability may exist without the institutional space necessary for agency. That distinction became particularly important in observing how institutions affect the lives of women and girls.
My experience with judicial institutions provided one of the earliest ways in which I saw institutional authority intersect with Female Agency. As a child, State judicial authority helped establish and protect the socio-legal conditions under which my mother could exercise responsibility for me as a single parent.
Years later, another institutional encounter with judicial authority shaped the legal and custodial environment surrounding my own daughter.
These experiences changed my understanding of institutions. They showed me that Female Agency is not confined to individual autonomy or household decision-making. It can operate within institutions, through institutions, to build institutions and to transform institutions.
The same realization emerged through other parts of my life. My daughter has been educated within a historic female-led girls-only educational environment. At one point, an intervention by a senior female public servant through official administrative channels contributed to a change in her school environment. What appeared externally to be a routine administrative decision could also be understood as a change in the capability environment available to a girl.
I began to see connections between apparently different forms of female institutional leadership: a female judge exercising judicial authority, a female public servant exercising administrative authority, a female educator shaping the environment of girls, and a working mother exercising economic responsibility. They can be connected through a common process:
Recognition → Responsibility → Capability Environment → Opportunity → Choice → Participation → Agency
I became increasingly interested in what happens between these stages. Technology added another dimension to this question.
Technological transformation is often discussed in terms of adoption, connectivity, productivity or innovation. I became more interested in a different question: When technology changes, who gets to become capable through that change?
A digital connection can provide access to information, education, networks and public participation. But it can also create exposure to harassment, surveillance, misinformation, gendered abuse or exclusion. Similarly, a new mobility technology may expand physical access while remaining constrained by affordability, infrastructure, safety, skills, household support or social expectations.
Technology therefore does not automatically produce agency. What matters is the environment surrounding the technology.
This became the beginning of my interest in Political Economy of Socio-Technical Transitions: understanding technological change not simply as technological progress, but as a transformation shaped by institutions, markets, infrastructure, governance, public administration and social relations. From this perspective, Science and Technology Policy and Digital Studies provide an upstream terrain. Socio-technical transitions provide an analytical lens. Institutions, governance and public administration become mechanisms through which technological opportunity may be converted into capability. And Female Agency becomes a downstream question: What happens to human capability when these systems change?
This question has become especially important across the female life course. I increasingly distinguish between female children, girls and women, not because they represent isolated categories, but because they encounter different capability environments. For a female child, protection, care, health, recognition, trust and early learning can establish foundations for capability. For a girl, education, voice, mobility, responsibility, financial discretion, technology and choice can expand those capabilities. For a woman, health, work, resources, participation, institutional recognition and influence can become pathways through which capability is exercised as substantive agency.
The progression is not automatic. Childhood does not mechanically produce girlhood capability, and girlhood capability does not mechanically produce adult agency. The surrounding institutions matter.
That insight has also influenced how I think about voice. I began writing publicly about Female Agency and using digital spaces not merely to communicate my own ideas, but to invite women and female students to contribute their own experiences. I repeatedly ask: Who first recognized your capability, potential or aspiration, and how did that recognition change what subsequently became possible? The responses have reinforced something I had begun to understand through my own experience. Women have described the influence of senior female officers, professors and other women who recognized potential, provided support, created opportunities or intervened at critical moments. These accounts have made me more interested in the relationship between voice, listening and institutional response.
A person may speak without being heard. They may be heard without being believed. They may be recognized without receiving an institutional response. They may receive a response without obtaining meaningful opportunity.
Voice therefore matters, but voice alone is not enough.
The deeper pathway may be:
Voice → Listening → Recognition → Response → Opportunity → Capability → Agency → Participation
And the process can become recursive. A person develops capability. Capability enables agency. Agency creates participation. Participation generates knowledge. Knowledge can contribute to institutional learning. Institutional learning can change institutions. Changed institutions can create new capability environments for others.
This is where my understanding of Female Agency has moved beyond individual empowerment. I now see it as potentially intergenerational.
My mother’s choices changed the conditions from which my own capabilities developed. My daughter’s emerging capabilities are being formed within environments shaped by the choices and institutions that surround her. Education, mobility, financial responsibility, safety, technology, environmental stewardship and public participation can therefore become connected parts of a larger process of capability formation.
My mother is no longer here to observe this process. Yet the capabilities created through her choices did not disappear with her.
That experience has made me think about Female Agency differently: agency does not necessarily end when a woman leaves a workplace, household or institution—or even when she leaves this world. Sometimes it continues through the capabilities, responsibilities and possibilities she leaves behind.
This has gradually become the intellectual architecture behind my research interests. I began with lived experience. I moved through public service and institutional observation. I began writing publicly and listening to the experiences of women and female students. I then started connecting these observations with scholarship on capability, gender, technology, institutions and socio-technical transitions. The result is not a claim that personal experience proves a theory. Personal experience gave me the questions. Public service gave me an institutional vantage point. Public knowledge exchange exposed me to other people’s experiences. Scholarship is now giving me the conceptual tools through which those questions can be examined systematically.
The question that now interests me is therefore broader than whether women, girls and female children have access to rights, services, education, finance or technology.It is:
Under what institutional and socio-technical conditions do access and opportunity become substantive capability—and under what conditions does capability become meaningful Female Agency?
This question connects my past professional experience with my emerging research trajectory in Science & Technology Policy, Digital Studies, Political Economy of Socio-Technical Transitions, governance and capability formation.
Ultimately, this is why Female Agency became an intellectual question for me.
Not because I began with a theory and searched for experiences to confirm it. I began with people, responsibilities, institutions and lived encounters. The theory came later.
And the research question continues to evolve: Who becomes capable when institutions and technologies change? Who is recognized? Who is heard? Who can participate? Who can exercise responsibility and influence? And how do the capabilities formed in one generation become the conditions from which agency can emerge in the next?
That is the intellectual journey that has brought me from lived experience to research interest.