The nominations for Pakistan’s most prestigious ‘Lux Style Awards’ have been announced and surprisingly not a single woman has been nominated in four different music categories.

The music section of the Lux Style Awards has four categories, song of the year, singer of the year, most streamed artist, and best live performance of the year and each category only features male artists this year.

Prominent female musicians took to social media to express their frustration with gender inequality in the nominations of the Lux Style Awards.

On Tuesday, Singer Meesha Shafi posted an Instagram story talking about the unfair nomination list.

“Not a single woman nominated in the LSA music nominations. Erasure at this scale (there is an exceptionally high number of nominations this time) of the entire female population occupying the Pakistani music industry is unjustifiable and highly problematic,” she wrote. She also tagged several fellow female musicians in the story, most of whom agreed with her.

The musician pointed out that women were being denied the recognition they deserve. Adding that a brand like Lux, who sells their soaps at the expense of women in their ads, ought to be more mindful of women’s equity on their platforms, especially when there is no shortage of women singing/songwriting and releasing high-quality music in any given year.

“LSA is accountable and should be answerable for this blatant discrimination,” she concluded.

Singer Zeb Bangesh re-shared Sahfi’s story and wrote that awards and nominations in our industry haven’t necessarily been a measure of an artist’s caliber, contribution, and popularity. However, they do reflect a certain form of acknowledgment and acceptance of an artist in the mainstream fraternity.

She wrote that the complete neglect of women on the platform of a female brand is surprising and a cause for concern.“ I’m wondering why NO woman artist made the cut this year?“ she added.

Singer Momina Mustahsan didn’t hold back either, taking to her Instagram story to comment on the lack of inclusivity. She added that it might have been an unintentional oversight from Unilever and Lux to “exclude an entire gender when setting out to acknowledge an entire industry, omitting female contributors even from the 80+ music works they did nominate in haphazard distribution, and that is exactly what the problem is when we take responsibility for extending nods on behalf of people, we owe it to be intentional, responsible, inclusive and fair to all.”

The “Yaariyan” singer went on to say that systemic inequalities that exist need to be addressed, specifically for women in the music industry.

“By completely ignoring every female contributor in music, we are depriving 110 million women of the representation and inspiration they truly deserve to see and be. Coming from a female-centric company like Unilever Pakistan that has made commendable efforts towards gender equality within their company by having strong female presence across their workforce and especially at executive positions, it doesn’t sit right,” she wrote while demanding the Lux Style Awards do better.

Maria Unera also called out Lux and said, “You’ll have women sell you soaps and products but y’all don’t have the decency to nominate women in music? Should be ashamed of yourselves. I’m not even surprised anymore at this point, just straight-up disappointed.”

Unera linked a list of the nominations and pointed out that this is the only list she has seen and not a single female artist has been named in the music category.

“Same…I just see the same dudes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again…. What a damn shame,” she said.

Singer Natasha Noorani also lamented that women were not nominated and said she was “So sick of the boys club. “

Interestingly, the list of nominations was removed from the Lux Style Awards website following criticism from showbiz personalities, and a message was released on Instagram that the awards website had suffered a technical glitch.