Improving women’s rights is important across the globe, but it is of utmost importance in countries like Pakistan. Even though Pakistan was the first Islamic country to have a female head of the state (Benazir Bhutto) and is the home of the youngest female Noble Laureate (Malala Yousafzai), it was recently ranked 143 out of 144 countries for gender equality by the World Economic Forum. Women in Pakistan not only regularly experience threats to their safety in the form of rape, assault, and domestic violence, but they are also frequently murdered by their own relatives in so-called “honor killings”.

One of the primary goals of the international human rights movement is to eliminate this kind of violence; indeed, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was created to outline countries’ obligations to women, and the United Nations (UN) regularly issues reports on the ways that countries need to change their policies to live up to their treaty commitments.

However, despite all the effort that has been put into the creation of CEDAW and the related UN reports, it’s still not clear whether these steps have helped to improve the rights of women around the world. Many scholars have attempted to research treaty compliance, and some have suggested that in certain cases human rights actually get worse after a treaty is signed. In the case of CEDAW, 189 of 193 members of the UN have ratified CEDAW, making it difficult to compare countries that have and have not become states parties to the convention. But even if a sufficient “control group” existed, there would be the problem that countries self-select into treaty regimes. Additionally, comparing data before and after a country ratifies an agreement is problematic due to the many potential confounding variables or long-running trends that pre-date UN treaties. Finally, the ways that organizations measure human rights violations—and the type and quality of data available—have changed substantially over the last few decades, adding a further complication to assessing change over time.

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