Why women work: Usra Murtaza on independence and identity

From architecture to computer science to media - a path nobody planned

The episode opens with Usra Murtaza tracing the long, winding route that brought her to a career in media and digital spaces. It is not a straight line. As a child in Karachi, she remembers the moment she first understood what an architect was - standing at a plot her family had bought, watching someone work over a design, and thinking, “This is what I want to do.” That conviction held until she was nineteen, when computers pulled her in a different direction. She was good at programming, genuinely good, and for four years the plan was computer science.

Then something shifted. A storytelling thread she had carried since childhood - a love of reading, of magazines, of writing in notebooks for no reason other than that it felt right - started pulling harder than the logic of a defined career path. Muzamil asks her about the moment she decided to pivot to media, and Usra is precise about it: she wanted to test herself. She had been getting marks by memorising textbooks. She wanted to know whether she could get marks - and build something - by using creativity instead.

“I wanted to test whether I could use creativity and still get results,” she says. “That was the real question.”

She applied to only one university, only one course. No backup. Her family, she notes, had always operated on a principle of letting each person pursue what they wanted - but media raised eyebrows. The perception that media meant appearing on television, that it was not serious, that it was not safe for women, was already in the air. She navigated it. She got in. And she says, without hesitation, that if she had gone anywhere else, she would not have met the people who shaped everything that followed.

The people you meet define the direction you go

Muzamil presses on this point - the role of peer networks - and Usra returns to it several times across the conversation. The friends she made at university were not just company; they were the mechanism through which opportunities arrived. One friend had researched an internship opportunity in America, knew the details, and pushed Usra to apply. Usra had not even known the programme existed. Both applied. Both got calls.

“If I had gone somewhere else, I would not have met those people,” she says. “And those people are the reason I am here.”

This is not nostalgia. It is a practical argument about how careers actually form - not through institutional prestige alone, but through the specific humans you happen to be in a room with, and whether those humans are the kind who share information, push each other, and move together. Usra is clear that she would go back to the same university, the same course, the same cohort, without hesitation - not because the institution was perfect, but because the people were right.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil connects this to a broader point about networking and exposure. Usra agrees, but frames it differently: for her, going out into professional spaces was not networking in the transactional sense. It was, she says, her actual profession - the act of meeting people, understanding contexts, building things with others. That orientation, she suggests, was already present in her before she had a job title for it.

How a love of magazines became a digital career

Usra grew up reading magazines obsessively. Sunday newspapers, her aunt’s collection, anything with long-form writing. She had decided early that if she was going to work in media, she would write - not just consume. The line she drew for herself was simple: if I am in media, I must also be able to write.

By the time she was in university, she had started to notice that print and digital were not as different as they seemed. The shift to digital was not a departure from the magazine world she loved; it was the same instinct finding a new form. She began watching content on YouTube deliberately - not passively, but as research. She started reading about content strategy. She found content writing as a skill she could develop and test.

“I realised that magazines and digital are not so different,” she says. “Everything is digital now. Print is just one format.”

From there, the path into digital community work and partnerships was not a leap - it was a continuation. The same curiosity about how stories reach people, how communities form around ideas, how information moves, ran through all of it. Muzamil notes that this kind of organic career development - where each step grows from a genuine interest rather than a plan - is rare to articulate clearly. Usra articulates it clearly.

Ownership, task completion, and the discipline of self-reliance

One of the more personal sections of the conversation is when Usra describes how she actually works. She is, by her own account, someone who cannot go to sleep with an unfinished task. She makes lists. She writes things down by hand so that she has seen them with her own eyes. She follows up. She does not wait to be told what to do next.

“I cannot proceed to the next day if something is not done,” she says. “I will lie awake thinking about it.”

This is not presented as a virtue to be admired but as a disposition she has always had - a need to close loops, to take ownership of things she has touched. She extends this to how she thinks about work itself: even a small contribution, a single email forwarded, a piece of research done, is hers. She put something into it. That sense of ownership, she argues, is what makes work feel meaningful rather than mechanical.

Muzamil asks whether this is something that can be taught or whether it is simply temperament. Usra does not give a clean answer, but she suggests that the environment matters enormously - that people who are given the freedom to own their work tend to develop this quality, and people who are not tend to lose it.

Workplace harassment and the environments that push women out

The conversation turns harder when Usra describes her internship experiences. She and a group of female colleagues were sent out for fieldwork - conducting interviews, delivering invitations for a seminar, doing the ordinary work of a media internship. During one such outing, all four of them began receiving harassing messages. Usra had not responded to the first message, and the messages to her eventually stopped. For the others, they continued.

They went back to the office and reported it to their supervisor. They showed the messages. The response was dismissive - a kind of institutional shrug that said, in effect, this does not happen here, or if it does, it is not serious.

“We showed the messages,” Usra says. “And the response was: this doesn’t happen. Maybe it didn’t happen to you, but it happens.”

What she describes next is the structural consequence of that dismissal. When something like this happens once, and the institution does not respond, the family hears about it. And when the family hears about it, the calculation changes. A daughter who was allowed to go out for an internship is now a daughter who came home with a story about harassment. The permission that was given gets reconsidered. The space that existed contracts.

Usra is direct about what this means at scale: women with the talent and the drive to build careers in media - or any field - are pushed out not because they lack ability but because the environment makes the cost of staying too high. She describes colleagues who left offices mid-day, who stopped going back, who absorbed the harassment in silence because the alternative was to tell their families and lose the opportunity entirely.

“If you give every woman a safe environment to work in,” she says, “she will go so much further than where she is today. Many are stopped not by their own limits but by the environment.”

Financial independence as a psychological shift, not just an economic one

The most sustained argument in the conversation is about financial independence - what it actually does to a person, and why it matters beyond the practical.

Usra describes the moment she received her first salary and stopped taking money from home. It was not, she says, primarily about the money. It was about what the money represented: that she was now responsible for herself. That the relationship between her and her family, and eventually between her and any future partner, would not be structured around financial dependency.

“From the moment I got my first salary, I stopped taking money from home,” she says. “And that changed everything.”

She is specific about why this matters in relationships. When one person in a partnership controls the finances, the other person’s voice in that partnership is diminished - not always deliberately, but structurally. Decisions get made by the person with the money. Opinions carry different weight. She has watched this dynamic play out around her, and she has decided she does not want it in her own life.

Muzamil raises the question of how this applies to households where one partner works outside the home and the other manages the home - a division of labour that is common and, in many cases, chosen. Usra does not dismiss this. Her argument is not that every woman must earn a salary. It is that the work of running a home has economic value that is rarely acknowledged, and that the person doing that work should have genuine financial agency - not an allowance, not permission to spend, but actual ownership of resources. She suggests a practical model: if one partner earns and the other manages the home, a portion of that income should be transferred to the home-managing partner as their own, not as household budget but as personal financial independence.

“The home is not nothing,” she says. “It is an empire. The person running it is working full time. That work has value.”

Marriage as a ceiling, and the question of what comes after

Near the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Usra discuss something that sits underneath much of what has come before: the way marriage functions, in Pakistani society, as a horizon that limits what women are allowed to plan for.

Usra describes watching this happen to people around her. A friend gets into a good programme, or wants to travel, or is considering a scholarship abroad - and the response from family is not encouragement but a kind of gentle redirection: finish this first, then we will see about marriage, or get married first and then you can do those things. The implication is that marriage is the event that unlocks the rest of life. But in practice, she observes, it often works the other way - it becomes the event after which the rest of life becomes harder to access.

She is not against marriage. She is against the framing of marriage as a reason to stop building. Her own position is that she wants to understand what a new role would mean for her life before she is in it - not to avoid it, but to be able to design her life around it rather than simply absorbing whatever it brings.

“I want to figure out what it means for my life before I am in it,” she says. “So I can plan properly, not just react.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil draws out a final thought from Usra about generational responsibility. The generation that is now identifying what is wrong - in workplaces, in families, in the structures that limit women - will eventually be in positions of power. When that happens, Usra says, the responsibility is clear: build the environments you wished had existed. Not just name the problem, but fix it.

It is a quiet ending to a conversation that has covered a lot of ground - from a girl standing at a plot in Karachi imagining buildings, to a professional who has thought carefully about what it means to own your work, your money, and your life.