Farzana Bari (Urdu: فرزانہ باری, born 7 March 1957) is a Pakistani feminist, human rights activist and academic who served as the director of the Gender Studies Department at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad Pakistan.
[1][2][3] Bari is a leading voice on issues of women's rights in Pakistan, with more than twenty five years of academic and professional experience in the field of gender studies.
She holds a Ph.D. degree in Sociology from University of Sussex, United Kingdom, with a doctoral thesis on "Effects of Employment on the Status of Women within Family."
[8][9] She militates against the male-dominated system of jirgas[10] and pleads in favor of looser Islamic rules regarding women's rights in Pakistan.
[11][12] In 2013, Bari estimated that at least eleven million women were not eligible to vote because authorities did not issued them the national identity card numbers.