Treatment of women by the Taliban

During their first rule of Afghanistan, the Taliban were notorious internationally for their misogyny and violence against women. In 1996, women were mandated to wear the burqa at all times in public. Women were not allowed to work, nor continue their education beyond the age of eight. Women seeking an education were forced to attend underground schools, where they and their teachers risked execution if caught. Women could not be treated by male doctors unless accompanied by a male chaperone, a barrier which deterred women from seeking healthcare, for many leading to untreated illness and/or further health complications. The Taliban enforced these laws through public corporal punishments and public executions.

After retaking control of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban initially granted women permission to attend universities, albeit in gender segregated classrooms, on the condition that they followed "Islamic standards". However, shortly after, the group expanded the restriction to prohibit girls from going to school beyond the age of 12 — the only restriction of its kind in the world. Additionally, they have prohibited women in Afghanistan from working in most sectors; there are limited exceptions for healthcare and education, though the Taliban's restrictions have proven prohibitively cumbersome for many women in these fields. Some provinces still allow secondary education for girls, despite the nationwide ban. Women are mandated to wear face coverings in public and barred from travelling more than 70 kilometres (45 mi) without a close male relative. In 2022, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban's reclusive leader, rejected international criticism and demands to ease human rights restrictions, refusing any negotiations or compromises on the Taliban's governance. Within two years after seizing Afghanistan, the Taliban shut down beauty salons and banned women from accessing gyms and parks. These restrictions have faced near-universal condemnation, including from Islamic governments and clerics in and outside Afghanistan who say the restrictions have no basis in Islam.

Laws

From the age of eight onward, girls in Afghanistan were not allowed to be in direct contact with males other than a close "blood relative", husband, or in-law (see mahram). From 27 September 1996 to 17 December 2001, when the Taliban were in control of 90 percent of Afghanistan, it imposed the following restrictions on women:

• Women should not appear in public without a mahram.
• Women must wear a burqa in public.
• Women should not wear high-heeled shoes as no man should hear a woman's footsteps lest it might excite him.
• Women must not speak loudly in public as no stranger should hear a woman's voice.
• All street-level windows should be painted over or screened to prevent women from being visible from the street.
• Photographing, filming and displaying pictures of girls and women in newspapers, books, shops or the home was banned.
• The modification of any place names that included the word "women". For example, "women's garden" was renamed "spring garden".
• Women were forbidden to appear on the balconies of their apartments or houses.
• Ban on women's presence on radio, television or at public gatherings of any kind.
• Women were not allowed to wash the laundry at the river banks. If found, the woman was to be brought into the custody of a male guardian who was supposed to severely punish her.

Mobility

The Taliban rulings regarding public conduct placed severe restrictions on a woman's freedom of movement and created difficulties for those who could not afford a burqa (which was not commonly worn in Afghanistan prior to the rise of the Taliban and considered a fairly expensive garment at upwards of US$9.00 in 1998 (equivalent to about $18 in 2025)) or did not have any mahram. These women faced virtual house arrest. In December 1998, a decree issued by the Ministry for the promotion of Virtue and prevention of Vice banned taxi drivers from transporting women who did not completely cover their faces. A woman who was badly beaten by the Taliban for walking the streets alone stated "my father was killed in battle ... I have no husband, no brother, no son. How am I to live if I can't go out alone?"

A field worker for the NGO Terre des hommes witnessed the impact on female mobility at Kabul's largest state-run orphanage, Taskia Maskan. After the female staff were relieved of their duties, the approximately 400 girls living at the institution were locked inside for a year without being allowed outside for recreation.

Decrees that affected women's mobility were:

• Ban on women riding bicycles or motorcycles, even with their mahrams.
• Women were forbidden to ride in a taxi without a mahram.
• Segregated bus services introduced to prevent males and females travelling on the same bus.

The lives of rural women were less dramatically affected as they generally lived and worked within secure kin environments. A relative level of freedom was necessary for them to continue with their chores or labour. If these women travelled to a nearby town, the same urban restrictions would have applied to them.

Employment

The Taliban disagreed with past Afghan statutes that allowed the employment of Afghan women in a mixed sex workplace. The claim was that this was a breach of purdah and Sharia law. On 30 September 1996, the Taliban decreed that all women should be banned from employment. It is estimated that 25 percent of government employees were female, and when compounded by losses in other sectors, many thousands of women were affected.

Another loss was for those whom the employed women served. Elementary education of all children, not just girls, was shut down in Kabul, where virtually all of the elementary school teachers were women. Thousands of educated families fled Kabul for Pakistan after the Taliban took the city in 1996.

Between April and June 1998, the United Nations left their offices in Qandahar following disagreements over a regulation which demanded the female staff to only operate accompanied by a mahram. The two parties later came to an agreement over the working conditions, but the Taliban demanded the agreement to be kept secret. However, most expatriate staff including the staff of the UN left Afghanistan following the death of a UN official in August 1998.

Taliban Supreme Leader Mohammed Omar assured female civil servants and teachers they would still receive wages of around US$5 per month, although this was a short-term offering. A Taliban representative stated: "The Taliban's act of giving monthly salaries to 30,000 job-free women, now sitting comfortably at home, is a whiplash in the face of those who are defaming Taliban with reference to the rights of women. These people through baseless propaganda are trying to incite the women of Kabul against the Taliban". A Taliban official mentioned in 1998 that in the Quran it says "stay at home" (in the feminine form), therefore there is not much to do other than to obey.

The Taliban promoted the use of the extended family, or zakat system of charity to ensure women should not need to work. However, years of conflict meant that nuclear families often struggled to support themselves let alone aid additional relatives. Qualification for legislation often rested on men, such as food aid, which had to be collected by a male relative. The possibility that a woman may not possess any living male relatives was dismissed by Mullah Ghaus, the acting foreign minister, who said he was surprised at the degree of international attention and concern for such a small percentage of the Afghan population. A Physicians for Human Rights researcher that travelled to Kabul in 1998 described "a city of beggars" filled with "women who had once been teachers and nurses now moving in the streets like ghosts under their enveloping burqas, selling every possession and begging so as to feed their children."

Female health professionals could be exempt from the employment ban, yet they operated in much-reduced freedom of movement. The ordeal of physically getting to work due to the segregated bus system and widespread harassment meant some women left their jobs by choice. Of those who remained, many lived in fear of the regime and chose to reside at hospitals during the working week to minimise exposure to Taliban forces. These women were vital to ensuring the continuance of gynaecological, ante-natal, and midwifery services, but it was on a much compromised level. Under the Rabbani regime, there had been around 200 female staff working in Kabul's Mullalai Hospital, yet barely 50 remained under the Taliban. NGOs operating in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 found the shortage of female health professionals to be a significant obstacle to their work.

The other exception to the employment ban allowed a reduced number of humanitarian workers to remain in service. The Taliban segregation codes meant that women were invaluable for gaining access to vulnerable women or conducting outreach research. This exception was not sanctioned by the entire Taliban movement, so instances of female participation, or lack thereof, varied with each circumstance. The city of Herat was particularly affected by Taliban adjustments to the treatment of women, as it had been one of the more cosmopolitan and outward-looking areas of Afghanistan prior to 1995. Women had previously been allowed to work in a limited range of jobs, but this was stopped by Taliban authorities. The new governor of Herat, Mullah Razzaq, issued orders for women to be forbidden to pass his office for fear of their distracting nature.

On 19 May 2022, the Taliban rulers ordered all female TV presenters to cover their faces on air. The directive came from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which replaced the country's Ministry of Women's Affairs after the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan.

In December 2022, the Taliban banned women from working in non-government organisations (NGOs), and ordered all such organisations to cease employment of female employees. This resulted in some NGOs being unable to continue their work in Afghanistan.

Education

First rule

The Taliban claimed to recognise their Islamic duty to offer education to both boys and girls, yet a decree was passed that banned girls above the age of 8 from receiving education. Maulvi Kalamadin insisted it was only a temporary suspension and that women would return to school and work once facilities and street security were adapted to prevent cross-gender contact. The Taliban wished to have total control of Afghanistan before calling upon an Ulema body to determine the content of a new curriculum to replace the Islamic yet unacceptable Mujahadin version.

The female employment ban was felt greatly in the education system. Within Kabul alone, the ruling affected 106,256 girls, 148,223 male students, and 8,000 female university undergraduates. 7,793 female teachers were dismissed, a move that crippled the provision of education and caused 63 schools to close due to a sudden lack of educators. Some women ran clandestine schools within their homes for local children, or for other women under the guise of sewing classes, such as the Golden Needle Sewing School. The learners, parents, and educators were aware of the consequences should the Taliban discover their activities, but for those who felt trapped under the strict Taliban rule, such actions allowed them an opportunity and a sense of self-determination and hope. The Undersecretary of Education Mawlawi Sa'id Shahidkhayl explained in 1998, that education for women was in need of a fatwa regarding its limits.

Since 2021

After their takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban initially gender segregated classrooms in universities as long as they "followed Islamic standards". However, in September 2021, they only allowed boys to return to school, preventing most teenage girls from returning to secondary education. The ban did not affect primary schools, but girls' attendance in those schools appeared to also have fallen significantly. In March 2022, the Taliban abruptly reversed their plans to allow girls to resume their secondary school education (defined as grade seven and upwards in Afghanistan). With the exception of the current cohort of university students, this decision leaves graduating from sixth grade as the highest level of educational attainment possible for Afghan women and girls. Secondary schools for boys reopened on schedule. Pakistani Islamic scholars, including Taqi Usmani, urged the Taliban to re-open secondary schools for women.

On 20 December 2022, the Ministry of Higher Education informed the country's public and private universities that women were suspended from university education. The ministry stated that female attendance would remain suspended "until a suitable environment" had been established at universities and promised that it would provide such a setting soon. However, BBC News pointed out that they had previously reneged on similar promises to reopen secondary education. Some Taliban leaders told BBC News that they disagreed with restrictions on female education. The Taliban decision was also widely condemned internationally. Some provinces still allow secondary education for girls despite the ban.

Government

On 17 August 2021, shortly after the Fall of Kabul, a senior member of the Taliban cultural commission, Enamullah Samangani, called on women to join the government. In contrast, in early September, the Taliban said that women would not be allowed to "work in high-ranking posts" in the government and "ruled out" women in the Cabinet. The acting Cabinet announced by the Taliban on 7 September consisted only of men.

Health care

Prior to the Taliban taking power in Afghanistan, male doctors had been allowed to treat women in hospitals, but the decree that no male doctor should be allowed to touch the body of a woman under the pretext of consultation was soon introduced. With fewer female health professionals in employment, the distances many women had to travel for attention increased while the provision of ante-natal clinics declined.

In Kabul, some women established informal clinics in their homes to service family and neighbours, yet as medical supplies were hard to obtain, their effectiveness was limited. Many women endured prolonged suffering or a premature death due to the lack of treatment. For those families that had the means, inclination, and mahram support, medical attention could be sought in Pakistan.

In October 1996, women were barred from accessing the traditional hammam, public baths, as the opportunities for socialising were ruled un-Islamic. These baths were an important facility in a nation where few possessed running water and the ban gave cause for the UN to predict a rise in scabies and vaginal infections among women denied methods of hygiene as well as access to health care. Nasrine Gross, an Afghan-American author, stated in 2001 that it has been four years since many Afghan women had been able to pray to their God as "Islam prohibits women from praying without a bath after their periods".

In June 1998, the Taliban banned women from attending general hospitals in the capital, whereas before they had been able to attend a women-only ward of general hospitals. This left only one hospital in Kabul at which they could seek treatment.

After the Taliban takeover, female healthcare workers reported safety issues and being harassed by the Taliban. Maternal health care conditions declined and many doctors reported that infant and child mortality had increased.

In February 2023, the Taliban ordered pharmacies in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif to stop selling contraceptive medicines and devices.

Ban on women's participation in healthcare sector

In December 2024, the Taliban's health ministry banned women from being trained in nursing and midwifery, according to media reports confirmed by The Guardian. This was a reversal of an earlier February 2024 decision to permit basic medical training for women. According to NPR, the health ministry had lobbied for an exemption from the general ban on women's education in the healthcare sector because "in some provinces, the Taliban does not allow women to seek treatment from male medical professionals." The Taliban's ban on basic medical training for women was widely condemned by human rights organizations as a danger to the health and well-being of Afghan women and children, with Afghanistan already having among the highest maternal mortality ratios in the world according to 2020 data, before the Taliban's 2021 seizure of power. For example, Heather Barr of Human Right Watch stated: "If you ban women from being treated by male healthcare professionals, and then you ban women from training to become healthcare professionals, the consequences are clear: women will not have access to healthcare and will die as a result." The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that the ban "is profoundly discriminatory, short-sighted and puts the lives of women and girls at risk in multiple ways."

Forced confinement

Family harmony was badly affected by mental stress, isolation and depression that often accompanied the forced confinement of women. A 1998 survey of 160 women residents or former residents of Kabul found that 97 per cent showed signs of serious depression and 71 per cent reported a decline in their physical well-being. Latifa, a Kabul resident and author, wrote:

The apartment resembles a prison or a hospital. Silence weighs heavily on all of us. As none of us do much, we haven't got much to tell each other. Incapable of sharing our emotions, we each enclose ourselves in our own fear and distress. Since everyone is in the same black pit, there isn't much point in repeating time and again that we can't see clearly.

The Taliban closed the country's beauty salons. Nail varnish and cosmetics were prohibited.

Taliban restrictions on the cultural presence of women covered several areas. Place names including the word "women" were modified so that the word was not used. Women were forbidden to laugh loudly as it was considered improper for a stranger to hear a woman's voice. Women were prohibited from participating in sports or entering a sports club.

Slavery of women

In 2017, Taliban members were accused of sanctioning forced marriages, marital rape, and slavery of women.