Sanitary pads in Pakistan carry up to 40 percent taxes. In a poor country, that amounts to punishing women, say critics – simply for being women. Omer is trying to get the government to scrap that ‘period tax’.

Growing up in Rawalpindi, a city adjacent to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, Mahnoor Omer remembers the shame and anxiety she felt in school when she had periods. Going to the toilet with a sanitary pad was an act of stealth, like trying to cover up a crime.

“I used to hide my pad up my sleeve like I was taking narcotics to the bathroom,” says Omer, who comes from a middle-class family – her father a businessman and her mother a homemaker. “If someone talked about it, teachers would put you down.” A classmate once told her that her mother considered pads “a waste of money”.

“That’s when it hit me,” says Omer. “If middle-class families think this way, imagine how out of reach these products are for others.”

Now 25, Omer has gone from cautious schoolgirl to national centrestage in a battle that could reshape menstrual hygiene in Pakistan, a country where critics say economics is compounding social stigma to punish women – simply for being women.

In September, Omer, a lawyer, petitioned the Lahore High Court, challenging what she and many others say is effectively a “period tax” imposed by Pakistan on its more than 100 million women.

Pakistani governments have, under the Sales Tax Act of 1990, long charged an 18 percent sales tax on locally manufactured sanitary pads and a customs tax of 25 percent on imported ones, as well as on raw materials needed to make them.