Our Daughters Are Educated. Our Society Is Not.

Every results season, our newspapers run the same picture: a gold medal around a girl’s neck, a degree in her hand, and parents behind her with eyes wet from pride. We applaud. We print the headline, “Daughters Surge Ahead”, congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment, and turn the page. But no editor runs the next frame, the one taken ten years later in a kitchen, where the same gold medallist stirs a pot while her degree sits on the top shelf of a cupboard, next to the wedding album. Both pictures belong to one story. We tell the first chapter with pride and draw a curtain over the second.
Educating a daughter and living with the consequences of her education are two entirely different moral examinations. In the first, society only pays a fee. In the second, it must change its habits, its priorities and the structure of its power. We have passed the first paper, more or less, and been absent from the second. So girls race ahead in university corridors, while the seats in offices, factories and decision-making rooms stay empty. Water pours into the pipe at full force and runs dry before it reaches the tap. Economists call this a leaky pipeline. We call it “their personal circumstances” and move on.
The leak is no accident. It is an inheritance. Its roots lie in the reform movement that raised the banner of women’s education and quietly stitched a condition into the cloth. Consider Asghari, heroine of Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s Urdu novel Mirat-ul-Uroos (1869). She was taught so that she might run her house better, serve her in-laws better and manage the family’s finances better. Nobody doubts the intentions of those reformers; for their age, it was a brave step. But inside that bravery sat an unspoken verdict: a woman’s knowledge is not her own property but the household’s asset. Education became jewellery, and jewellery has one destiny: to be worn, displayed, and locked away in a box at the owner’s convenience.
A century and a half on, that condition still breathes in our matrimonial ads. “M.A. pass, domestic, obedient, pious.” Degree and docility are written in one breath, as if they were not opposites but twin specimens of the same virtue. The degree is not evidence of ability; it is one more line in the dowry. And the girl whose qualifications climb past a certain unspoken ceiling finds a “suitable match” harder to come by. Think about what that means. A society in which being too educated obstructs a marriage does not honour education. It fears it. What alarms it is not knowledge but the question that follows knowledge: “Why?”
Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929 that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. Nearly a century later, our educated daughter has no say over her income and no room whose door locks from the inside. If she is lucky enough to reach a job, she meets what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild named “the second shift”. When the office clock stops, the home clock starts, and this second shift carries no salary, no leave and not even a thank-you. Add harassment on the commute, the scarcity of childcare, and the erosion of confidence in a workplace that never wanted her. Then add the sentence that serves as the final weapon of affection in her in-laws’ house: “We don’t need your income.” It sounds like reassurance. Look again and it is a courteous declaration of ownership. To deny that she is needed is to deny her authority, and a woman with no authority over her earnings soon has none over her decisions.
So can education alone guarantee freedom? The world’s experience says no. In Iran, women have long dominated university enrolment, yet their share of the workforce is among the lowest in the world. The learning is there; the social permission and the economic openings are not. Bangladesh, which started from conditions no better than ours, offers the opposite lesson. It backed girls’ secondary schooling with stipends, and its garment industry normalised women working outside the home. The model is not flawless; wages and working conditions there draw serious criticism. Yet it proved something basic: education bears fruit when society accepts a woman’s presence in public life as ordinary. Amartya Sen defines development as the expansion of freedom, and has argued that women’s agency, the ability to make decisions about their own lives, is central to it. By that yardstick, a degree is a road to agency, not agency itself. What sense is there in building the road and padlocking the destination?
A truly educated society, then, cannot be measured by the number of women in its lecture halls. It is measured by the questions we rarely ask. Does a daughter own her salary? Does she have a voice in choosing her partner? Is her disagreement treated as argument or as insolence? Is raising children called “her duty” or a shared responsibility? Does she enjoy, on the street, in the office and at the bus stop, the safety her brother takes for granted? And what of the manager who asks a candidate across the interview table, “When are you getting married?” Has he ever noticed that with that one question he cancels every academic credential he claims to respect? Where the answers are no, millions of degrees cannot certify a society as educated. The real examination is conducted in behaviour, not in the syllabus.
I know the objection: ingratitude. We did educate our daughters, what more do you want? There is a piece of truth in that, and it deserves acknowledgement. Many families today make sacrifices for their daughters’ schooling that their own parents never imagined. The change is real, and to sneer at it would be bad manners. But half a task earns no full credit. To give a bird wings and keep the cage key in your pocket is not generosity; it is a refined form of injustice. Such an education is a loan taken out in the daughter’s name, and she pays the interest in talent left unused.
It is we who need schooling, not our daughters: the father, the brother, the husband, the mother-in-law, and the officeholder who weighs a woman’s talent on the scale of her marital status. The state’s duty is just as plain: childcare centres, safe transport, flexible working hours, and a harassment system that does not punish the woman who complains. These are the bricks from which an educated society is built. Without them we will go on handing out medals and filling kitchens.
Our daughters passed their examination long ago. The question paper is now in society’s hands, and this time the examiners are the daughters.