By Zainab Imran | Personal Story, Women in STEM, Pakistan
#WomenInSTEM #PakistanTech #GirlsWhoCode #STEM #PersonalStory
Sialkot is famous for two things: surgical instruments and sports equipment. It is a manufacturing city, a trading city, an exporter’s city. It is not, historically, known as a place where young women become software engineers.
I became one anyway. This is that story the honest version, not the LinkedIn version.
The Question I Was Always Asked
“Why computers?” It sounds like a simple question. But when you are a girl in a city where the expectation is clear finish school, marry well, keep the home the question means something else entirely. It means: why are you choosing this? Why are you making things harder for yourself?
My answer, then and now: because I could not stop. The first time I understood how a program worked, how logic could be written into instructions that a machine would follow, something clicked that has never unclicked. I did not choose software engineering the way you choose a career. It chose me the way music chooses some people. I could not imagine not doing it.
“The gender gap in STEM is not a talent gap. It is an expectation gap. And expectations can be changed.”
What the Path Actually Looked Like
I enrolled in BSc Software Engineering at Virtual University of Pakistan a fully online, HEC-accredited program that made higher education accessible to students across the country without requiring relocation. It was not glamorous. It required a level of self-discipline that no one teaches you and no classroom enforces.
I taught myself Python. I taught myself machine learning fundamentals. I built projects not because a professor assigned them but because I had problems I wanted to solve. AURA_AI my open-source assistive AI system came from reading about the 5.5 million Pakistanis living with sensory impairments and thinking: why does the technology that could help them not exist in a form they can access or afford?
Alongside my degree, I founded Nature Impex an international e-commerce platform for a Sialkot leather manufacturer, built entirely from scratch with no external budget. I was twenty years old. I learned WooCommerce, international pricing structures, SEO, and digital export strategy by doing them, not by being taught them.
What I Want Other Girls in Pakistan to Know
The path is not easy. I will not tell you it is. There will be people well-meaning people, people who love you who will question why you are working this hard at something that feels uncertain when the certain path is right there.
But here is what I know now that I did not know when I started: the uncertainty is the point. Every problem I have not yet solved is an argument for why I need to keep going. The AI systems being built right now will shape who has access to healthcare, to education, to economic opportunity. If women from the Global South are not in those rooms, those systems will be built without us in mind and the people who most need them will be the ones most poorly served by them.
That is why I study. That is why I build. That is why I am not stopping.
If you are a young woman in Pakistan considering a STEM path and you want to talk my inbox is open. Find me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zainab-imran-480514231
