The Screen in the Corner: What Cable Television Changed for Women and What Pakistan Never Measured

Two toilets became twenty-five

An anthropologist working in rural India recorded something no ministry would have thought to fund. In one village, household toilets went from two to twenty-five in four years. In another, a man in his fifties told her television was “the biggest thing to happen in our village, ever”, then went out and bought a fan he had seen on it.

The toilets are the interesting part. Nobody had gone door to door with a sanitation grant. A screen had arrived in the neighbourhood, and households had quietly rearranged their priorities around what they saw on it.

What the study actually found

That anecdote sits on top of one of the most quoted papers in development economics: “The Power of TV”, by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2009. They followed 2,700 households across four Indian states and Delhi between 2001 and 2003, surveying women aged fifteen and older as cable television spread from town to town. Because villages got cable at different times, the researchers could compare places that had it with places that did not yet.

The results were large and they arrived quickly. Son preference fell by twelve percentage points. The likelihood of pregnancy fell by 3.7 percentage points. School enrolment for children aged six and seven rose by five per cent the following year. Women’s autonomy (whether they could leave the house without permission, whether they had a say in household decisions) improved, and stayed flat in villages without cable. At the outset, sixty per cent of the women surveyed thought a husband was justified in beating his wife in at least one of six situations; in villages with cable, that number of situations fell.

The finding that should stop a policymaker cold is this one. Before cable, rural women answered these questions very differently from women in Delhi. Within a year of cable arriving, roughly half of that gap had closed. On the preference for sons, it closed even more.

It was not the television. It was the dish.

Two details explain why this worked, and both are easy to miss. Nobody needed to own a set: people watched at a neighbour’s or relative’s house, so one connection reached far more women than the households paying for it. And the installer was usually one local man with a dish antenna, sometimes choosing a village simply because the woman he bought vegetables from lived there. Villages had cable for six or seven months on average before the women were surveyed again.

The effect was largest in the villages where things had been worst for women to begin with, the opposite of how most development spending behaves, because those are the hardest places to reach.

Brazil saw a version of this too: areas that received telenovelas recorded fewer births. Tamil Nadu later announced free colour televisions for 75 lakh homes, one stated reason being to help village women learn more.

Pakistan ran this experiment and did not measure it

Here is the uncomfortable part. Pakistan did not miss the cable revolution; we lived through it. Gallup Pakistan’s media tracking shows television viewership climbing from 24 per cent in 1979 to 81 per cent in 2013, driven by the private channel boom and the cable operators who wired up mohallas from Karachi to Chitral. For two decades, millions of Pakistani households received, in effect, the same treatment Jensen and Oster were measuring in India.

We never asked what it did to our women. We have a regulator that licenses channels, rating services that count eyeballs, and a drama industry that is genuinely world class. What we do not have is a single serious Pakistani study of the kind the Indian paper represents: a before-and-after measurement of what happened to girls’ schooling, household decision-making or son preference when the screen arrived in a village. The experiment ran. Nobody wrote down the results.

What our own screens have already proven

The evidence that Pakistani television can move behaviour is not speculative. The Kashf Foundation has produced serials built deliberately around social problems: Udaari on child sexual abuse, Rehai on child marriage, Zard Patton Ka Bunn on education. Its impact assessment found 56 per cent of participants credited Udaari with raising awareness of child sexual abuse. Academic work over the past decade reaches the same conclusion from the other direction too: these serials shape attitudes towards women, often by reinforcing the very norms that hold them back.

Then there is reach. Since Zee launched the Zindagi channel in 2014, Pakistani dramas have become one of our most effective exports; a 2026 serial, Meri Zindagi Hai Tu, has crossed two billion views from India and 3.35 billion globally. Our stories travel further than our diplomacy. That is a strange amount of influence to hold without measuring what it does at home.

The new dish is in a woman’s hand, or it is not

Cable is now declining here. Gallup’s 2025 media survey found that smartphones have overtaken television as the most-watched screen: 29 per cent of Pakistanis watch programmes on a phone and 28 per cent over the internet, against 22 per cent on cable and 11 per cent by satellite. Household internet use has gone from 34 per cent in 2019 to over 70 per cent, with mobile broadband subscriptions past 139 million.

So the intervention has changed shape, and so has the inequality inside it. The GSMA reports that eight million Pakistani women came online in 2024, cutting the mobile internet gender gap from 38 per cent to 25 per cent, with its 2026 report showing the ownership gap narrowing from 37 to 27 per cent. Real progress, but a gap that size means the device carrying the effect is still handed to men first, and rural women remain the least likely group in the country to own a smartphone.

Why the stakes here are higher than in India

Because our starting point is worse, which the Indian research suggests is exactly where the returns are largest. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 gender gap index places Pakistan third from bottom: female labour force participation around 28 per cent against 81 per cent for men, female literacy 48.5 per cent against 69 per cent, and women in roughly six per cent of senior managerial posts. Around 25 million children aged five to sixteen are out of school, disproportionately girls: 31 per cent against 25 per cent of boys. The sex ratio at birth sits near 108 boys per hundred girls, with research pointing to unequal treatment after birth rather than before it.

Those are the same indicators the Indian study found a dish antenna moving within months. We are not talking about a marginal instrument.

The honest part

A television is not a development strategy, and the paper’s authors were careful: the changes were measured in what women reported, and the wider social context may have done part of the work. Our screens also carry much that pushes the other way, with serials in which a woman’s suffering is the plot and marriage is the resolution.

But the cheapest intervention available to Pakistan may be one we never counted as an intervention at all. The dish is already in the village; the phone is nearly in the house. What is missing is the willingness to measure what happens next, and to admit that the most powerful thing we ever put in a Pakistani home, we never bothered to study.