In a country where fewer than one in eight women can afford a sanitary pad, Mahnoor Omer decided the law was the place to fight back.
In February 2026, she was named one of TIME’s 16 Women of the Year, joining a prestigious list of global trailblazers like filmmaker Chloé Zhao and Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
Karachi-born lawyer Mahnoor Omer was 25 years old when she walked into the Lahore High Court and filed a petition that would put Pakistan’s government on the defensive.
Her target, a 40% tax burden on menstrual products, is a combination of duties and sales taxes that pushes sanitary pads far beyond the reach of most Pakistani women.
The numbers behind her case are stark. Only around 12% of women in Pakistan have access to commercially produced menstrual products. The rest make do with cloth, rags, or other unsanitary alternatives, a quiet, unglamorous crisis that contributes to health complications and keeps girls out of school.
Omer’s petition demands that the state reclassify menstrual products as essential goods, the same category as food and medicine.
It is a straightforward legal argument with an enormous human cost attached to it.
An activist before she was a lawyer
Omer’s career in advocacy didn’t begin in a courtroom. It began at 14, when she founded the Noor Foundation, an NGO that runs workshops in rural Pakistani villages on menstruation, sexual health, and climate change. That early work shaped the lens through which she would later approach the law, not as an abstract institution, but as a tool with direct consequences for women’s bodies and lives.
She went on to study at the London School of Economics, earning a postgraduate degree in Gender, Peace, and Security, before returning to Pakistan to clerk at the Supreme Court and work on gender mainstreaming within the criminal justice sector. The through-line in all of it has been the same: finding where systems fail women and pressing on the pressure points.
Global recognition, local stakes
In February 2026, TIME magazine named Omer one of its 16 Women of the Year, a list that also included filmmaker Chloé Zhao and Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The recognition placed her story in front of a global audience, but the fight she is waging remains intensely local.
Pakistan is not alone in taxing menstrual products; governments around the world have faced similar challenges, and many have backed down. The United Kingdom scrapped its so-called “tampon tax” in 2021.
India removed the GST on sanitary pads in 2018 following sustained public pressure. Omer is making the same argument in a country where the stakes, given poverty levels and cultural taboos around menstruation, are considerably higher.
Her case is still working through the courts. But in a legal culture where gender is rarely centered, the petition itself is a statement that menstruation is not a private inconvenience to be quietly managed but a public health issue that the state has a responsibility to address.
For Omer, the math is simple. A tax on periods is a tax on being a woman. And she intends to fight it.
