The Contested Relationship Between Paid Work and Women’s Empowerment: Empirical Analysis from Bangladesh

Abstract

The debate about the empowerment potential of women's access to labour market opportunities is a long-standing one but it has taken on fresh lease of life with the increased feminization of paid work in the context of economic liberalization. Contradictory viewpoints reflect differences in how empowerment itself is understood as well as variations in the cultural meanings and social acceptability of different kinds of paid work. Research on this issue in the Bangladesh context has not been able to address these questions because it tends to use very restricted definitions of work and narrow conceptualizations of empowerment. This paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data from Bangladesh to explore this debate, distinguishing between different categories of work and using measures of women's empowerment which have been explicitly designed to capture the specificities of local patriarchal constraints.

Role of social business in women entrepreneurship development in Bangladesh: perspectives from Nobin Udyokta projects of Grameen Telecom Trust

“…Thus, men's dominance in the household decision-making process reduces women's control over the financial resources (Uddin et al, 2016).Generally, women are less attractive in the labor market due to their illiteracy, unawareness, less political representation, deprivation, rigid social customs, religious constraints, and injustice by their counter partners particularly in rural areas (Hossain & Rahman, 1999;Chowdhury, 2000;Afrin et al, 2008;Tambunan, 2009). Meanwhile, the culture of purdah also restricts women in engaging labor market activities that are outside their usual household domain, and thereby confine them to household chores or other labor market activities that can be carried out from the home (Kabeer et al, 2018). Moreover, rural women have lack of access to credit (Alkire et al, 2013) that is thought as one of the major obstacles for them to pursue their income generating activities (IGAs) (Mahmud et al, 2019).…”

Disentangling the Impact of International Migration on Food and Nutrition Security of Left-Behind Households: Evidence from Bangladesh

“…Indeed, even though some characteristics of the head can arguably influence households' outcomes, the headship should be considered endogenous to migration. In fact, female-headed households are significantly more frequent among migrant households, but at the same time, almost all migrants are male and one out of three is registered as husband of the household head, suggesting that the headship shifted to the wife after the husband's migration (Kabeer et al 2018).…”

The HERrespect intervention to address violence against female garment workers in Bangladesh: study protocol for a quasi-experimental trial

“…Due to access to garment sector jobs, some young women delay marriage and childbirth [ 14 ]. And with their own income they are more likely to make their own decisions on spending that takes account of their health, leading to improvements in their well-being and that of their family [ 15 ]. Overall, formal employment and bringing home earnings may raise female workers’ value within their own family and may improve their capacity to negotiate within their households.…”