The Radius of Freedom

A few months ago, a relative was visiting us at home. Her husband was meant to pick her up, but his plans changed and he couldn't come. So, she booked a ride through a ride-hailing app and, without realising it, selected a bike instead of a car. When the ride arrived, she was shocked to find a motorbike waiting at the gate.

She took it anyway. And she has been on the receiving end of jokes about it ever since.

She is a doctor.

I keep coming back to that detail. Here is a woman with more education than almost anyone in the room. She had somewhere to be, the means to pay, and a ride waiting at the door within minutes. She got home safely. Yet the story that survived wasn't that a doctor sorted herself out when her plans fell through. It was that she rode on the back of a bike.

It also took a mistake for her to get on one at all. Left to choose, she would never have picked the bike. The option was right there on her phone, cheaper and quicker, and it simply wasn't one she would have considered.

Family jokes are rarely just jokes. They are one of the ways a family reminds itself where the lines are.

Her story is a small one, but it sits on top of a much larger question. When a woman graduates from university, she has a degree, skills and, hopefully, ambitions. Perhaps she even has a job she wants. But a deceptively simple question comes next: How does she get there?

Pakistan has been quietly producing an interesting contradiction. In 2024–25, 272,089 women graduated from higher-education institutions, compared with 250,418 men. Women now account for more than half of the country's university graduates. Yet only about one in four Pakistani women aged 15 and above participates in the labour force, compared with roughly four in five men. So we have a strange situation. More women are becoming qualified, but far fewer are becoming economically active.

We usually look for the explanation in familiar places: social norms, marriage, childcare, workplace culture, discrimination and the availability of jobs. All of these clearly matter.

But there is another question that is surprisingly easy to overlook: What if part of the problem is simply getting from here to there?

We tend to think of education as the bridge between a person and opportunity. Get educated, get qualified, and get a job. But perhaps we have confused capability with access. A degree can give a woman the qualification to become an accountant. It doesn't necessarily give her the ability to travel 15 kilometres to an office every morning. It can qualify her to become a teacher, but it doesn't necessarily solve how she gets to a school safely. She can have the skills to become a designer, doctor, lawyer or entrepreneur, but the opportunity may still be somewhere else. And if you cannot reliably get there, that opportunity remains theoretical. Education gives a woman the qualification to go somewhere. Mobility gives her the ability to get there. That distinction matters.

One of the most interesting pieces of research I've come across is a labour-market experiment in Lahore. Researchers gave female jobseekers different transportation options and measured what happened to their job-search behaviour. The result was striking. Providing women-only transportation more than doubled job-application rates. Mixed-gender transportation had much smaller effects. The important finding wasn't simply that transport needs to be cheaper. The research suggested that safety and social acceptability of the journey itself were significant constraints.

Think about what that means. A woman can be willing to work. She can have the qualifications. There can be a job available. And yet the journey between her home and that job can be enough to keep the job out of reach. The barrier isn't necessarily the job. It is the radius of her independent movement.

The Lahore finding raises a harder question. If the constraint isn't the fare, what is it?

Many Pakistani families can afford a motorcycle. Many women are physically capable of riding one. Many of the places they need to go are within practical riding distance. So the question is rarely "Can she ride?" It is "Should she ride?" Those are very different questions, and the second one isn't answered by price.

Part of the answer lies in who public space belongs to. In Pakistan, roads, chai dhabas, mechanic shops, bus stops, truck stands and petrol stations are coded as masculine spaces. Men are expected to occupy them. Women tend to enter them conditionally, on the way to somewhere else. A woman on a motorcycle isn't simply using a vehicle. She is visibly claiming space in an arena that has historically belonged to men.

In many middle-class households the worry isn't really the motorcycle. It is visibility. A rider is exposed. She is seen, she attracts attention, and she becomes noticeable in a way a passenger never is.

Think back to my relative. Nothing about that journey was unsafe in the way we usually mean. What changed was how visible she was. A doctor arriving in a car is unremarkable. A doctor arriving on the back of a bike is a story. And it was more than visibility; she was sitting behind a man she didn't know, which is exactly what the women-only vans in Lahore were designed to prevent. The jokes did what norms usually do. Nobody forbade anything. They made a sensible decision feel slightly embarrassing, and every woman who heard the story learned the lesson without anyone having to say it.

This is where respectability comes in. Families often judge a mode of transport less on utility than on dignity. Put three options side by side: a car with a driver, a ride-hailing service and a motorcycle. Purely on economics, the motorcycle usually wins. On perceived status, it usually comes last. Motorcycles carry associations with male labour, delivery riders, students and lower-middle-income life, and they put the rider on public display. A car offers the opposite: privacy, enclosure, protection from the male gaze, and a quiet signal of status. One preserves respectability. The other exposes it to scrutiny.

Underneath this sits an unspoken picture of the good daughter. She moves with purpose. She isn't overly visible. She doesn't attract attention. She stays within accepted boundaries. A woman confidently weaving through traffic challenges almost every part of that picture at once.

And there is something deeper still. Mobility has long been one of the quieter forms of control. A woman who depends on her father, brother, husband or driver to go anywhere has her movement mediated by someone else. Give her a scooter of her own and that changes. She can leave without asking for a lift. She can choose where she goes and when. Her social world can grow without anyone's sign-off. That is a real shift in power within a household, and not every family welcomes it. Some of the resistance we put down to safety is really resistance to that shift.

I want to be careful here, because safety isn't an invented concern. Women on Pakistan's roads do face harassment, and families are right to worry about it. But "safety" usually carries more than one meaning. Part of it is the risk of an accident, which men face too, and in greater numbers, without anyone suggesting they stop riding. Part of it is harassment, which is real. And part of it is reputation: what people will say, and what it signals about the family. Safety has become the acceptable word for all three. If we only answer the first, we will keep wondering why nothing changes.

It also explains the Lahore result better than cost ever could. The women-only van worked because it was respectable. It moved a woman without putting her on display.

Pakistan is not the only conservative society to wrestle with this, and some of our neighbours have moved further.

Bangladesh is the obvious comparison. In many ways it is no less conservative, yet women moving through public space every day became ordinary there much earlier. The main reason was work. From the 1980s onwards, the garment industry drew millions of women into factories, and they had to get there every morning. Necessity forced adaptation. When enough women are on the streets at seven in the morning, the street stops treating them as exceptions. Pakistan never had female employment at that scale, so its norms have moved more slowly.

India's story is as much about branding as economics. Manufacturers built scooters for women and marketed them that way, most famously TVS with the Scooty in the 1990s. Advertising showed students, teachers, office workers and mothers. The scooter became a symbol of practical independence rather than rebellion. In cities like Pune, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Chennai, a woman on a scooter became unremarkable. And once something reaches that point, the question flips. People stop asking "Why is she riding?" and start asking "Why isn't she?"

Nepal shows the power of necessity. Where public transport is thin, two-wheelers are simply how people get around, and women in Kathmandu ride in large numbers. When mobility is indispensable, norms bend faster. Pakistan's cities offer just enough alternatives (a driver, a brother, a rickshaw, a ride-hailing app) for older norms to hold on.

Pakistan hasn't yet crossed that threshold. Women riders here are still the exception, and that creates a barrier of its own. Most Pakistani girls grow up seeing fathers and brothers on motorcycles, male delivery riders and male mechanics. They rarely see their mothers ride, or a female teacher arrive at school on a scooter, or a woman professional commute on her own. I think of this as an imagination gap. If you have never seen someone like you doing something, it doesn't feel like an option. It feels abnormal.

Look around Pakistan today and you can see a small cultural shift beginning. Women are learning to ride motorcycles and scooters. Programmes such as Women on Wheels have been built explicitly around giving women greater independent mobility. Provincial governments are now handing out electric scooters to women. Researchers are studying the question more rigorously too, with field experiments designed to test what happens when women get their own motorised scooters. We should be careful here. The evidence does not yet allow us to say that scooters cause mass increases in female employment. But perhaps that isn't the most interesting question anyway. The more interesting question is: What happens when a woman has control over where she can go?

If the deepest barrier is social permission, the solutions look different from the ones we usually propose. Cheaper scooters and better charging matter, but they come later. This is what I think would come first.

Make it respectable before making it cheap. The scooter should be presented as a tool of the good daughter, not a rejection of her. A woman riding to university, to her clinic, or to drop a younger sibling at school isn't escaping her family. She is serving it, while depending less on everyone else's time. Here, framing matters more than features.

Bring the family in, rather than going around them. Programmes that treat fathers and husbands as obstacles will encounter them as obstacles. It's better to give them a role. A father who teaches his daughter to ride has moved from guardian to instructor, and he becomes the most credible advocate a programme could have. The radius can grow in stages too: one familiar route first, home to campus in daylight, then wider as trust builds.

Concentrate, don't scatter. A thousand scooters spread across a province will produce a thousand exceptions. The same thousand concentrated in one university, one hospital or one neighbourhood can produce a norm. India's lesson is that adoption accelerates once visibility reaches critical mass, and critical mass is local. The goal should be the morning a student arrives on campus and sees ten other women parking their scooters.

Put women riders where respect already sits. Teachers, lady health workers, policewomen and bank staff. When women in respected public roles ride, they lend the act their respectability. One teacher arriving at school on a scooter teaches a lesson no advertisement can.

Let the technology do some of the cultural work. This is where electric scooters matter more than their batteries suggest. A motorcycle in Pakistan carries meanings of masculinity, ruggedness, speed and mechanical competence. An electric scooter can occupy a different category altogether: smart, modern, clean, professional. It also quietly removes some of the masculine spaces from the journey. Charge it at home or at work and you don't need the petrol station. Fewer moving parts mean fewer trips to the mechanic. A step-through frame suits shalwar kameez, and a full-face helmet gives the rider something a car usually provides: a degree of anonymity. None of this needs to be pink. The brand that wins won't sell another motorcycle. It will sell the first genuinely modern urban mobility device.

Let work create the necessity. Bangladesh didn't normalise women's mobility through campaigns. Work did it. Employers who need women at their desks, wards and classrooms have every reason to help them get there: financing scooters through payroll, offering safe parking and charging, and organising group rides from common points. Necessity has defeated hesitation elsewhere. It can do so here.

Imagine Pakistan took all of this seriously. Not a token scheme that gives a few hundred women scooters for a photo opportunity, but a programme that made personal mobility genuinely affordable and acceptable, through subsidies, low-cost financing, training, licensing, safety support, and a deliberate effort to win families over. The immediate temptation would be to count scooters. 10,000 women. 100,000 women. A million women.

But the more interesting number wouldn't be the number of scooters distributed. It would be the number of lives whose radius had expanded. A woman who previously depended on her husband, father or brother to take her somewhere could travel independently. A graduate who could only consider jobs within walking distance might suddenly have access to an entirely different part of the city. A teacher could take a job in another neighbourhood. A nurse could extend her working hours. A young woman could attend a course after university. An entrepreneur could visit customers.

None of these things is guaranteed. A scooter doesn't remove childcare, workplace culture, or the shortage of suitable jobs. But it changes one fundamental variable: whether an opportunity is physically reachable. The subsidy therefore isn't really subsidising a vehicle. It is subsidising access to opportunity.

That is a very different way of thinking about public spending. We routinely think of subsidies as reducing the price of a product. But some subsidies reduce the distance between a person and a possibility. What if Pakistan stopped thinking about a scooter subsidy as a transport subsidy and started thinking about it as an employment intervention? We already have experimental evidence that acceptable transport can dramatically increase women's willingness to apply for jobs. So perhaps the question isn't: "Can we afford to subsidise scooters for women?" It might be: "What would it cost us not to?"

This isn't unique to Pakistan. Research on India's free bus schemes for women has found increases in women's participation in paid work, particularly among women whose jobs require travelling beyond their immediate neighbourhoods. And there is an earlier, beautifully simple example. In Bihar, the government gave bicycles to girls entering secondary school. The bicycle wasn't really an education policy in the traditional sense. It was a mobility intervention. Yet researchers found that the programme significantly increased girls' secondary-school enrolment, particularly for girls living further from school. The bicycle changed the distance between the girl and the classroom. And that changed what was possible.

This is where I think we often misunderstand technology. We look at a scooter and see a scooter: a machine with two wheels, an electric motor, a cheaper way to travel. But technology often matters less for what it is than for what it allows people to do, and for what it allows them to be seen doing. People adopt technologies when they become socially acceptable, often long before they become technically optimal. For a man who already has independent mobility, a scooter might simply be a cheaper or faster way to get around. For a woman whose movements depend on family members, public transport, safety and social expectations, it can represent something else entirely. It can expand her radius: the places she can reach independently, the jobs she can consider, the university she can attend, the clients she can meet, the hours she can work, the decisions she can make.

There is a tempting simplicity to the argument: educate women and they will work. But reality appears more complicated. Education gives capability. Mobility gives access. And access, it turns out, depends on permission as much as on roads. The missing link may not always be education. Sometimes it is the distance between the person and the opportunity, and sometimes the distance that matters most isn't measured in kilometres. It is the distance between "Can she ride?" and "Should she?"

The breakthrough probably won't come when scooters get cheaper or batteries get better. It will come when a mother sees another mother dropping her children at school on one. Or when a doctor gets herself home on a bike she chose on purpose, and nobody thinks it's worth a joke. The real battle isn't for the roads. It is for cultural permission, and that is won through visibility and example long before it is won through engineering.

Which is why the humble scooter is worth paying attention to. Not because it is going to solve women's employment in Pakistan. It won't. But because it represents something much more fundamental: the ability to decide where you can go without waiting for someone else to take you there. That may be one of the most underrated forms of freedom. And perhaps the next chapter of women's economic participation in Pakistan won't be written only in universities and offices. It may also be written on the road between them.