Unlocking Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh: Key Determinants and Insights

Abstract

Introduction: Though seventy percent of the world's poor are women who consistently face peculiar social, cultural, educational, political, and related problems, there is a need to address issues relating to women's empowerment to ensure sustained economic development. Bangladesh is a country where the social status of women is meagre. The socio-cultural environment of Bangladesh also contains pervasive gender discrimination, as a result, women have to face many obstacles to their development.

Objectives: The main objective of this study is to construct a women’s empowerment index that shows the women’s actual conditions and contributions to the household. Along with this, another objective is to estimate the socioeconomic determinants that can influence the value of women’s empowerment index.

Methods: To achieve this goal, we constructed the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) under five major dimensions (production, resource, income, leadership, and time) using the data of the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS) for the period 2018-2019. After constructing the index, we performed both descriptive and econometric analyses to achieve the objectives.

Results: The study findings show that WEAI is positively influenced by household savings, expenditure, and livestock and negatively influenced by the age of the household head, size of household, land size, road types, and dependency ratio. Remarkably, the result shows that marital status has a positive and significant effect on the WEAI which means married women are more empowered than never married, divorced, and separated women.

Conclusions: The Bangladeshi government has been actively promoting women's empowerment through education and training programs, including the provision of stipends. We conducted research to develop Women Empowerment Index (WEAI), which assesses the level of women's involvement in and out of the home. According to the study, married women have greater empowerment than others due to engagement on both their land and their husbands' property. Socioeconomic variables, home conditions, and community conditions exert a significant influence on WEAI values, establishing that these elements are the primary determinants of WEAI.