Fundamentally, the countries that economically succeed do so by having productive labour.
This often does involve adding women to the workforce, and that does help in making labour (for FDI, exports, etc) more attractive from a cost standpoint. But that in itself isn't the cause for economic success. It's a huge correlative factor, and I think a supporting factor, but not the cause.
The U.S., for example, was also an economic powerhouse prior to adding women to the workforce. Why? Because the U.S. had tuned its economy to produce things of value both domestically and for the world market. It had used its labour force (which was mostly males) in an efficient manner. Even as their population grew, they still managed to channel that labour growth in an efficient way.
However, in Pakistan, our society fell into the trap of "easy money."
From 1947, we had a creeping culture of giving 'supporters' easy jobs and access to resources. This culture was amplified manifold from the time of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto via the nationalization scheme that gave a lot of people easy wealth. In the following decades, programs like quota programs, income grants (BISP), etc, all compounded to get money into the hands of people who didn't earn it productively.
So, when the population grew, it grew in a cultural environment that didn't understand or value productivity. Worse, we never invested in education and skills training to put that population to work in an effective way. As a result, we ended up with a lot of people looking for handouts and easy money.
To prevent this inept population segment from revolting, our governments kept the easy ride system, but financed it through aid and, later loans. This, in turn, borked our ability to fund public programs (like education) by diverting more of our fiscal means to repaying debt and interest.
Anyways, if we had built a culture of 'earning your keep' instead of 'sticking your hand out,' then I think the population growth would've stabilized naturally (even in a conservative climate). But too many people got too much money too easily for decades, and that opened the floodgates to population growth, and we didn't have any plan to harness that labour pool productively.