Sughra Rajab adjusts her hijab, ties her laces, and starts training at a football field under a hot Karachi sun to prepare for her team’s next game.

Rajab, 19, is here to represent her hometown at the National Women’s Football Championship, a month-long tournament with at least 500 women participating. “This is much more than a sport for me,” Rajab told VICE World News. “This is about making a statement.”

Rajab comes from the Hazara community in Pakistan. Back home in Balochistan province’s Quetta town, playing football can be a matter of life and death.

Terrorists routinely target Hazaras and consider them “lesser Muslims” for being Shi’ites. Elsewhere in the country women continue to fight for gender parity. Pakistan is ranked 151 out of 153 countries, only ahead of Iraq and Yemen, in the most recent World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. Organizers of Pakistan’s annual women’s march are facing concerted online attacks and many have gone into hiding.

But Rajab and her team of 18 players from the Hazara Quetta Football Academy have learned to live with the risks while striving for a better future through football. “The situation is depressing. There would hardly be a family without a martyr in our town. But we have to move forward,” she said, referring to the victims of targeted terrorist attacks on the Hazara community.

Rajab is in high school and hopes to secure admission to university through sports scholarships.

Though her team has managed to win only one game in the championship so far, she remains upbeat and thinks that merely participating is a victory.

It is not Rajab alone who wants to break gender stereotypes by playing football.

Karishma Ali, 23, is another aspiring female footballer from the mountainous and conservative Chitral area in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bordering Afghanistan.

Ali became the face of Pakistan’s women football circuit in 2019 after making it to the Forbes list of 30 Under 30.

Ali said people in other countries do not understand that it is not easy for women to play football in Pakistan. “The culture is different, particularly in Chitral,” she said, referring to her hometown. “When I was in the spotlight, I faced intense online bullying.”

Her parents, who run a school in Chitral, are her biggest allies. Supporters also told her she should not get distracted as it was common for female athletes in conservative places to get criticized for breaking gender norms. But not all threats are idle.

“You can choose to take it as a joke but you have to stay alert,” said Ali, who started Chitral Women’s Sports Club in 2016.

She said despite the backlash, the overall situation is better for women like her. “When I was a child, I could not play football. But these women who we play with and train, when they go back to their villages, make their own small teams and play the sport. It is really heartening to see,” she said.

The Pakistan Football Federation’s media manager Mir Shabbar Ali said the idea of the championship is to provide more matches for women’s clubs and gradually increase the level of skill.

“It is indeed a reality that women in Pakistan have not had equal opportunities as that of men, and that is why the federation wants to move forward by arranging for an equal number of games for both the men and the women players,” he says.

“This is just the start. We want to create a system where there is also equal payment for men and women players.”

Follow Umer Bin Ajmal on Twitter.