Career-Driven Life: Sacrifices & Success Ft. Fatima Mazhar

This one is a conversation I have wanted to make happen for a very long time. I sit down with Fatima Mazhar, someone I am deeply personally inspired by. You might know her as one of the early people who joined Careem and launched it right here in Pakistan, but her story reaches so much further than that. We talk about her incredible career, yes, but we also dig into being an army kid who never stood still, growing up as the sibling of an autistic sister, the constant judgment women face around their bodies and marital status, and the quiet loneliness of always being the only woman on the sports field. It is one of the most honest and layered conversations I have had, and I am so glad to share it with you.

The army brat who learned not to get attached

Fatima was born in Lahore but never stayed in one place. Her father was in the military, so her childhood was a carousel of cities. Peshawar, Quetta, Gujranwala. She calls herself an army brat, and she credits that constant moving for shaping who she became. Every two years meant a new school, a new house, and a fresh set of faces.

That rhythm teaches you something specific. You learn to make friends fast because you have no choice. You learn to fit in anywhere. And maybe most of all, you learn how not to get attached, because a goodbye is always waiting for you. Fatima jokes that this might be where her commitment issues come from, but she is only half joking. That restlessness became the engine of her career. She has never been able to stay still.

Beaconhouse was the one constant. Wherever her father was posted, there was usually a Beaconhouse, and back then the standard of education was genuinely strong. She laughs that the podcast is not sponsored by them, but it was a lifeline for kids like her.

The job that humbled her and the sister who grounded her

Fatima went to the US for college, and her first year was lonely. Pakistan spoils you with friendship, she explains. Here, once you are friends, you do everything together. That was not the case in a new country. She filled the silence with sports, riding horses in the morning and playing rugby in the evening, and she took a job.

Not a soft one. She worked catering, which meant serving food, clearing plates, and washing up afterwards. She tells me it really humbles you, because in Pakistan we have so many opinions attached to the work people do. We treat the waiter differently from the manager. In that kitchen, none of that mattered. To this day, when she is living with friends, she still volunteers to do the dishes because she never learned to cook. She says it is therapeutic.

But the true anchor of her life is her younger sister. Her sister is autistic and has a condition called Perry syndrome. Fatima describes it simply: her brain stopped developing at age five, so she is a five-year-old in a grown person’s body. She is verbal in her own way, incredibly smart, and loves getting her nails done at Nabila’s.

Growing up, the most painful comments did not come from strangers. They came from inside the family. Fatima has cut off relatives who said cruel things. She remembers a classmate once calling her sister a slur, and she punched the girl. She says softly, “I said now your nose is broken.” It was not, but the feeling was real. Now she channels that protectiveness differently. She takes her sister everywhere, to restaurants, to the polo arena, to salons, because she refuses to hide her. “I’m not ashamed of her,” she says. “Other people are, so they hide them. If I can take her out and generate awareness on autism, that would make me very happy.”

Launching careem in pakistan and refusing to hear no

Fatima’s professional story is built on a single truth she learned early: she would never be looked at as a girl in the places that mattered most.

When Careem was just beginning, she sat next to Mudassir Sheikha and learned directly from him. The startup gave young people enormous responsibility and did not care about your gender, only that you were willing to work and learn. She never said no to anything. She would finish her own work and immediately ask what was next, or sit with other teams just to understand what they were doing. That ownership made her feel like the company’s success was personal.

Then came the assignment that changed everything: launching Careem in Pakistan. People told her it would never work. No brother, no father, no mother would let a girl sit in a car with a stranger. Every time she heard that, her resolve grew. She started doing it herself, ordering rides at every hour of the day without telling the drivers she worked there. If she felt safe, she reasoned, she could lead by example. Soon the women at LUMS felt safe too.

She was not just sitting in an office. She selected the first drivers, did the first hiring, and trained the team on the ground. She says plainly, “I was the launcher.” There are others who may claim it, but she was the first one in. The greatest compliment she ever received came from Mudassir when someone hesitated about sending a woman into a new market. He said, “She’s tougher than all of you men put together.”

A conscious choice between career and marriage

At some point, the questions started. When will you get married. Why are you not married. Fatima was in her late twenties when the Careem opportunity arrived, the exact age when society expected her to be looking at rishtas. She took 286 flights in two years. She was in a different city every few days. How could she be a present partner to someone when she could not even stay in one place?

She made a conscious choice. She prioritized her career. And she is honest about what that cost. She says she would not be where she is if she had been married, and certainly not if she had children. She looks at the mothers in her workplace with deep admiration. “I don’t know how I would be with my children. I don’t know if I would leave them out of my sight.”

But the world does not let her forget. She got into MIT, which she ranks as one of the top three moments of her life, and a colleague emailed to congratulate her and added that now she would find a really good husband. She bought her own Mercedes, and people assumed her father bought it for her. She pays for her own polo horses, which most male players have funded by family, and still people ask if she works in marketing or HR. “It boils my blood,” she says, “because people think those are the only two things women can do.”

What sports taught her about being the only woman in the room

Fatima has played cricket in Quetta, rugby in college, and now polo in Lahore. Nearly every field she has stepped onto has been all men. She tells me about being told she talks too emotionally to the umpire during a match, while a male player saying the same thing in the same tone faces no consequence.

She is not taken seriously when she talks about cricket, even though her Twitter is dedicated to it and she can bury a troll in stats. When men say “you’re one of us,” they mean it as a compliment. She hears the hidden message: sports are not for women.

But sports also gave her discipline and a way to stay sane. She makes it a point to hire people who have a hobby outside work because it tells her they are passionate about something beyond the job. She recently picked up praying tahajjud, inspired partly by watching how cricketer Rizwan spoke about his faith with such passion. She credits that single change with transforming a lot of things in her life.

Women have to be our own biggest supporters

Somewhere deep in the conversation, we land on a hard truth Fatima does not shy away from. The patriarchy is real, but so many of the gatekeepers are women. The mother-in-law who reminds a working daughter-in-law that her real job is the kitchen. The aunty who refuses a beautiful, intelligent doctor as a rishta unless she agrees to never work again. The female colleagues who compete instead of championing each other.

Fatima says she can count on one hand the women in her sixteen-year career who have had her back the way male colleagues have. She insists this must change. “We are our biggest enemies,” she says. “If we were to turn around and say our mothers would say go work, our mother-in-laws would say I’m proud of you, things would be different.”

She also wants women to stop reducing each other and themselves to appearance. She talks about gaining weight when she moved back to Pakistan and started eating home-cooked food after seventeen years abroad, and how everyone suddenly had an opinion. At the same time, she refuses to accept that her body defines her fitness. “I can lift more than guys in terms of weight,” she says, “but this is not appreciated.”

Nothing changes until we change the conversation

Near the end, Fatima looks at me and says something I keep thinking about. She had been waiting to come on this podcast for two years. She thought maybe she was not good enough to be here. That moment of raw honesty between us is exactly why this conversation matters. The imposter syndrome is real, even for a woman who launched one of the most successful companies in the region and graduated from MIT.

She is still figuring out what she wants to be. Not in terms of a job title, but in terms of who she is. Her answer is simple and disarming: “If I can end up being described as a kind person that was nice to others, I would have done well in life.” I think she already is, and I hope she keeps letting herself believe it.