Women in Bangladesh

The birth of a female child is rarely considered a happy incident. If a woman cannot have a male child, usually the husband remarries. The female child is also given less priority. They are given less love and affection by the family and the relatives. Female child is usually offered less nutritious food; less money is spent on their education. They are more abused and rebuked. They have to do large part of the household work.

These meanings are complementary rather than contradictory. Poor women do tend to be poorer than poor men; even the better-off households often have poor women as members; and poor women suffer most from external shocks. The negative impact of reform measures that slashed public expenditure on health and education has hit women hardest. It has increased their burden since it is they who try to compensate for the shortfall of public services. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98, there was clear evidence that rural women bore much of the burden of the reduction in incomes caused by falling remittances from the urban areas. Women function as a ‘safety valve’ when public social security systems fail (Kelkar and Osawa 2000). In the rural areas of many countries in Asia, there are more women than men among the ‘working poor’ than among the poor as a whole. In other words, the female proportion of the working poor is larger than the female proportion of the working non-poor (Bardhan 1993). Women are also disproportionately concentrated in the lowest remunerated categories of self and casual wage labor.

Bangladesh, like other South Asian countries, has been described as a staunchly patriarchal society. In the countryside, men work in the fields and move about freely, while women are often secluded in their homes. Women's direct role in major household decision making also appears to be limited. Yet societies change. More women are working in Bangladesh is expanding industrial sector, more are using contraceptives, and more girls are attending school. Have these and other changes been accompanied by improvements in the status of women? Between 1982 and 1989, the Mother and Child Health/Family Planning Extension  Project of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, collected data from 7,433 ever-married women between the ages of 15 and 56. The survey focused on two rural areas that differ in ecological, economic, cultural, and political termsó Sirajgong and Gopalpur subdistricts in north-central Bangladesh and Abhoynagar and Fultala subdistricts in the southwest. Survey results from these two areas provide a unique opportunity to explore the changing status of women in rural Bangladesh. The objective of the study, summarized in this issue of Asia-Pacific Population & Policy, was to identify variations in the general pattern of low status  for women and to assess the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics associated with womenís changing roles.

Table: Cumulative contribution of selected predictor variables to explaining variations in women’s decision-making authority: Total percentage of variance explained

Source: United States Agency for International Development