Fading female hands in AI era

"They built the brand that put Bangladesh on the map. They stitched our way into export dominance. And now, the very women who powered this success are being quietly pushed out."

A feminist economist told me this recently, her frustration sounding like a warning bell. For decades, women were the heartbeat of Bangladesh's ready-made garments industry, once making up 80 percent of its workforce. Today, that figure has slipped to 60 percent. With the advance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is women who are being switched off first.

This is not an isolated trend. A recent Daily Star report revealed a national loss of 2.1 million jobs in the first half of the fiscal year, with women accounting for 85.7 percent of those losses.

It is no coincidence. This is the predictable result of policy neglect in the face of technological disruption. Bangladesh sits on a demographic opportunity, with 47 percent of its population under 25 and 65 percent under 35. Two million young people enter the job market every year, yet women make up only one-third of the labour force.

According to the Labour Reform Commission, women's participation in formal skill development courses has dropped from 41 percent in 2016 to 33 percent in 2024. The figures for higher-level vocational training are worse: only 12 percent of students in higher secondary vocational tracks are female, and in polytechnic diploma programmes, the figure is 14 percent. For senior executive development courses, the kind that feed management pipelines, the number is a mere 9.7 percent. The government's target for 2028 is a modest 15 percent.

These are not just numbers; they are warnings. Each AI-powered machine added to a production line takes a low-skilled job, which has long been a feminine domain.

Meanwhile, our competitors are moving ahead. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia are integrating AI training into national technical and vocational education and training curricula, offering targeted scholarships for women in technology, and building female-led innovation hubs. Here, the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, tasked with championing women's economic empowerment, has failed to grasp the urgency of this shift.

That competitive edge, often described as "collective efficiency", came from the human coordination, reliability, and trust on a female-driven production floor. Now, as machine-led productivity takes over, our exports risk losing both speed and soul. The US market, which buys more than $9 billion of our garments annually, will not be saved by a 20 percent reciprocal tariff if our core workforce is hollowed out.

Yet solutions exist. Forward-thinking factories, working with the Ella Alliance, are creating new roles such as "AI Quality Assurance Partner", where women supervise intelligent visual inspection systems. Platforms like Digital Dorji Apa enable female tailors to sell bespoke designs globally using AI-powered customisation tools. These models show that women can adapt and lead in an automated economy if given proper training, technology, and institutional support.

What we lack is scale and urgency. While some skills projects set a target of 30 percent female participation, many courses remain in the low teens. In some technical trades, women's share is as low as 2 percent.

Bangladesh can turn this around. It requires a political choice: to treat women's skilling not as charity but as core economic policy.

This means binding gender quotas in vocational and technical programmes, funding women-led tech initiatives, aligning industry and academia to create AI-era curricula, and ensuring every factory that invests in automation also invests in human retention.

If we fail, the women who built our garment industry will watch from the sidelines as it moves on without them. And we will lose more than jobs. We will lose the very hands that stitched Bangladesh's place in the world.

The writer is coordinator of Ella Alliance and founder of Ella Pad