By Mahe Zehra Husain
Last month, the young Pakistani fashion designer, Parishae Adnan, appeared on 365 News’ ‘Rise and Shine’ morning show, hosted by Nadia Khan and co-hosted by Zohaib Hassan. Parishae had just achieved a significant career milestone, presenting her collection at New York Fashion Week, where it closed Flying Solo’s showcase.
Yet the conversation turned to her gym videos and whether her parents approved of her clothing choices. It got me thinking about how often we miss the opportunity to engage with a woman’s work because we’re too busy examining the woman herself. What does it actually mean to support women if we’re still so uncomfortable with their autonomy?
We encourage women to be ambitious, build businesses, enter new industries and take up space. We celebrate their milestones and tell the next generation that anything is possible. But the encouragement often comes with conditions. Be successful, but don’t be too outspoken. Be confident, but don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Build something remarkable, but be prepared to explain your decisions to everyone who has an opinion about how you should live. And this judgment doesn’t begin when a woman makes it. Sometimes, it begins the moment she decides to try.
Think about a woman who wants to start her own business. Before she has even tested her idea, found her first customer or made her first sale, she may already be anticipating the questions…
What if it doesn’t work? What will the family say? What will people think? Why couldn’t she just stick to a conventional job? Wasn’t she being unrealistic? In our part of the world, the dreaded “log kya kahenge?” isn’t just a passing remark. It can become a powerful force shaping the decisions people make, the risks they’re willing to take and the opportunities they allow themselves to pursue. For women, the stakes can feel particularly high. A business that fails may be treated as evidence that she shouldn’t have tried in the first place. A change of direction can be interpreted as indecision. An ambitious idea can invite scepticism before it has even had a chance to prove itself. And so, many times, women don’t start because they’re crippled with fear and anxiety.
Not because they lack the talent or the grit, but because the prospect of public judgment becomes one more risk they must calculate before taking the first step. Of course, starting a business is genuinely difficult. There are financial risks, practical constraints, market realities and countless things that can go wrong. Not every hesitation is caused by social pressure, and not every business idea will succeed. But we should ask ourselves whether we’re making it harder for women to try by attaching so much personal judgment to the outcome. As someone who works in technology and entrepreneurship, I believe building something meaningful requires room to experiment, make decisions, take risks and learn from mistakes. Failure is not always the opposite of progress. Sometimes, it is the information you need to make a better decision the next time around.
Women deserve that same room to learn. This is something I’ve thought about deeply while writing ‘Women Rising.’ Helping women succeed isn’t simply about encouraging them to be more confident or giving them a checklist for building a business. It’s also about questioning the expectations and assumptions that make the journey harder than it needs to be. We simply cannot tell women to be courageous and then punish them for taking a chance. We cannot encourage entrepreneurship and then treat a failed venture as a verdict on someone’s ability, intelligence, heart or judgment. And we cannot claim to support women’s independence while expecting their choices to meet everyone’s approval.
Supporting women means more than applauding their success when we agree with their choices…it means respecting their right to make those choices in the first place! This applies to how we respond when a woman starts a business, changes careers, puts her work in the public eye or simply chooses to do things differently. It also applies to the questions we ask women when they achieve something noteworthy. Can we begin with the work itself? What did she build? What did she learn? What obstacles did she overcome? What did she have to sacrifice in the process? What can we learn from her experience? There is a difference between asking thoughtful questions and putting someone’s personal choices on trial.
If we want more women to lead, create, innovate and build businesses on their own terms, we need to make room for them to do so without constantly asking them to justify who they are along the way. Perhaps we also need to rethink how we talk about failure. What if a business that doesn’t work out is a lesson rather than a source of shame? What if changing direction is a sign of sound judgment rather than weakness? And what if the people around a woman responded to her attempt with curiosity and support, rather than an “I told you so?”
The author is an award-winning Pakistani entrepreneur, mathematician, data scientist, educator and author of more than 20 books. She is Chief Data Scientist at Ballogy, a US-based sports technology company, and has over 14 years of experience in technology and entrepreneurship. Her latest book, ‘Women Rising: A Practical Guide to Building a Business You Love!,’ offers women a practical, values-driven approach to building businesses on their own terms.