Shahida Kazi, Pakistan’s first woman reporter, passed away in Karachi on Saturday following a brief illness, the family said. She was 79.

She passed away a day after she was discharged from the Civil Hospital on Friday. The funeral prayer would be offered on Sunday after Zuhr’s prayers, the family said and added that she would be laid to rest in the University of Karachi’s graveyard.

Shahida became a reporter at Dawn in 1966 when it was believed the profession was unsuited to women. Later, she was associated with the Pakistan Television for around 20 years. In the state broadcaster, she served as the news producer, news editor, and later led an academy.

She was born in 1944 into a family that encouraged women’s education. When she enrolled in the Department of Journalism at the University of Karachi in 1963, she realised she was the country’s first and only woman student of journalism. She was awarded a gold medal for outstanding performance in the Journalism Department.

Shahida also served as a professor at the state university.

“I decided this [journalism] was what I wanted to do,” she said in an interview with Arab News that was published on March 15, 2022. On her first assignment, Shahida was sent to cover the activities of Afghanistan’s queen who visited Pakistan.

She had told the news outlet that covering the death and funeral of Fatima Jinnah, the sister of Pakistan’s founding father, was one of her memorable assignments. It was a front-page story.

“I sometimes feel that I really did something for the cause of women empowerment in Pakistan since women were completely neglected in the newspaper business before me,” she had told the news outlet.