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When progress moves forward but preparation doesn’t
There’s a frustration many women feel today, but struggle to articulate without sounding unfair:
They are doing more, managing more, thinking more
and still expected to carry everything.
The easy conclusion is:
“Men have become incompetent.”
But that explanation doesn’t hold under scrutiny.
The deeper issue is this:
Women are being prepared for modern life. Many men are not being prepared for a modern partnership.
This is not a claim that men are less capable.
In fact, in many regions, including South Asia, men still:
(World Bank, 2023; Pakistan Labour Force Survey 2024–25)
So the issue is not a lack of intelligence.
It is misalignment.
Women today are being trained formally and informally to:
Globally, women now outperform men in education and are more likely to complete tertiary studies (OECD, Education at a Glance, 2024; UNESCO, 2023).
Yet despite this progress, women continue to perform the majority of unpaid care and domestic work—up to three times more than men globally (ILO, 2018), and significantly higher in South Asia (UN Women, 2024).
This creates a structural imbalance:
Expanded responsibility without redistributed effort.
Over the last few decades, women have adapted rapidly.
They had to.
They entered education, employment, and public life
without exiting their traditional responsibilities.
So instead of replacing roles, women absorbed more.
Meanwhile, many men were not equally required to adapt within the domestic or emotional sphere.
And when these two trajectories meet within a household,
the imbalance becomes visible not in theory, but in daily life.
When women describe men as “incompetent,”
They are rarely referred to as intelligence.
They are responding to patterns such as:
This is not a capability issue.
It is a conditioning gap.
The imbalance is not only practical, it is emotional.
Women are not just doing more.
They are also receiving less recognition for it.
Unpaid labour, mental load, and emotional coordination are rarely acknowledged as real work (ILO, 2018).
Over time, this creates:
A quiet erosion of connection.
Because effort without recognition does not build partnership—it builds distance.
A common counterargument is that women lack religious education and that this contributes to an imbalance in roles and expectations.
At first glance, this appears valid.
But a deeper analysis requires a better question:
If a gap exists, how was it created?
Historically, access to structured religious education and scholarship has been more accessible to men.
Women’s learning has often been:
So any gap reflects not just individual effort, but systemic limitations in access and prioritization.
At the same time, this argument carries a contradiction:
If men are more “educated,” why does that not consistently translate into fairness, responsibility, and partnership within the home?
Islam does not measure knowledge by information alone but by action.
“O you who believe, why do you say what you do not do?”
Qur’an 61:2–3
The Prophet ﷺ said:
“The best of you are those who are best to their families." Sunan al-Tirmidhi, 3895
And Aisha (RA) reported:
“He used to serve his family…” Sahih al-Bukhari, 676
Islam establishes mutual dignity:
“They are garments for you, and you are garments for them.” Qur’an 2:187
And individual accountability:
“For men is what they have earned, and for women is what they have earned.” Qur’an 4:32
So the issue is not:
Who knows more
But:
Who lives what they claim to know
Many men today appear modern:
But in practice:
This creates a contradiction:
Progress in language, without progress in behavior
In South Asian contexts, this imbalance is amplified.
Cultural norms still reinforce:
Even as attitudes shift, traditional expectations remain deeply embedded (Pew Research Center, 2022).
This is not a problem that resolves itself.
1. Raise Boys for Responsibility
2. Redefine Masculinity
3. Stop Normalizing Female Overload
4. Build True Partnership Models
This is not a crisis of intelligence.
It is a crisis of preparation.
Women were prepared for a changing world.
Many men were not prepared for what partnership in that world requires.
And now both are expected to build a life together inside that mismatch.
