Women, Business and the Law

It is disheartening that despite our professed commitment towards women's empowerment, we have actually fallen two notches in the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law (WBL) 2020 study. The WBL study evaluates countries based on constraints on women's freedom of movement, law's affecting women's decisions to enter and remain in the workforce, laws and regulations concerning job restrictions and the gender wage gap, gender differences in property and inheritance laws, and constraints that women face when starting and running a business, among others. Bangladesh now ranks 171 out of 190 nations, lagging behind other South Asian countries, such as India, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

The dismal ranking of Bangladesh is hardly surprising though. By and large, women in Bangladesh earn about half as much as men, with the gender gap increasing as we move to the informal sector. More than one-third of women in the labour force are actually unpaid family members, according to another report by the World Bank titled "Voices to Choices: Bangladesh's Journey in Women's Economic Empowerment". There continues to be gender gaps when it comes to asset control—non-agricultural ownership of land is 12 times higher for men than it is for women. Meanwhile, only 1.7 percent of enterprises in the formal sector are owned by women, adds the report.  

Rather than pay lip service to women's empowerment, Bangladesh needs to do more to dismantle barriers to women's economic participation. Among other things, Bangladesh needs to pass a legislation guaranteeing equal pay for work of equal value, repeal discriminatory laws that hinder women's access to land and other resources, improve women's capacities to take on jobs in higher-paying industries and occupations and enforce policies and schemes that support women entrepreneurs and make credit easily available to them. At the societal level, we must challenge patriarchal values and norms which deem women—and by extension their labour—inferior to men.