Bangladesh is not short of women in leadership, be it in business, government offices, or academia. It is short of women in electoral politics.
Over the past two decades, women’s presence across public life has expanded steadily and measurably. Girls now outnumber boys in secondary education. Maternal and child mortality have declined sharply. Women’s economic agency has grown through microfinance and the ready-made garment sector, both of which rely overwhelmingly on women’s labour. These gains were not incidental, but the result of sustained state policy, long-term NGO engagement, and deliberate investment in women as economic and social actors.
Women’s representation has also grown within the state itself. Bangladesh has 495 upazilas, and today roughly one-third of all upazila nirbahi officers are female. Women now serve across administrative tiers: as assistant commissioners, additional deputy commissioners, and senior field-level officials—roles that were overwhelmingly male a generation ago. This shift matters because it shows something crucial: when institutions are rules-based, women advance at scale. But when it comes to party politics and elections, the numbers collapse.
After the closing of the nomination withdrawal deadline last week, with the exception of two constituencies, women made up just over four percent of general-seat candidates, while 30 registered political parties nominated no women at all. This is not a pipeline problem, but a structural divergence: women are increasingly present in governance and service delivery, but systematically excluded from competitive political power. This divergence tells us something important: that in Bangladesh, women have been professionalised for growth, but not politicised for governance.
Despite a proposal by the National Consensus Commission requiring individual political parties to nominate women candidates in five percent of general seats, most political parties failed to follow through. BNP nominated only 3.5 percent women candidates and Jamaat-e-Islami nominated none (Prothom Alo, January 22, 2026). Smaller parties initially nominated a few women but withdrew some of them afterwards. Former women’s affairs reform commissioners and women’s rights activists criticised the parties for failing to honour promises and limiting women’s political participation. This highlights a broader trend of women being underrepresented in Bangladeshi elections despite prior agreements and advocacy efforts.
Ironically, the country has been governed by women at the very top of the political hierarchy. That visibility created an assumption that women’s leadership would gradually filter down through party structures and electoral pipelines. It did not. As I argued in a previous article titled “The paradox of women in power and the myth of soft leadership,” published in The Daily Star, female leadership at the apex did not manage to dismantle the masculine architecture of party politics, but ended up functioning within it.
The result is the paradox we now face: women’s authority personalised but not institutionalised in a climate where power has remained concentrated. Presence has not become participation for grassroots and middle-class women in the country.
This makes the current political moment particularly consequential. With an interim government led by Dr Muhammad Yunus—globally recognised for pioneering microfinance as a pathway to women’s empowerment—there was a reasonable expectation that women’s political representation would be institutionally safeguarded. That has not happened. Despite its reformist mandate, the interim government has not meaningfully intervened to protect or expand women’s presence in political decision-making, whether through transitional arrangements, nomination frameworks, or implementation mechanisms. This failure now risks setting women’s political participation back further, particularly at a moment when party structures are actively narrowing access.
The exclusion of women from electoral politics is often explained away as culture, conservatism, or lack of “electability.” But what we are witnessing can be better understood as a political backlash. As women’s social and economic agency expanded through education, income, public authority and visibility, their potential political presence became harder to ignore. Rather than absorbing this shift, party structures responded by retrenching. Women are being redirected to reserved seats. Competitive constituencies are deemed “too risky.” This backlash is as ideological as it is procedural and strategic.
A recent episode inside the National Citizen Party (NCP) illustrates this clearly. When senior male leaders chose to pursue an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, several women leaders left the party in protest. Their exit was not symbolic. It revealed how strategic decisions about ideology and alliances were made without women. It was clear that women’s participation was conditional.
The digital sphere continues to reinforce this exclusion. Women who speak politically face disproportionate online harassment, moral policing, and character attacks. Parties interpret this hostility as electoral liability, using it to justify their reluctance to nominate women. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: women are excluded because politics is hostile, and politics remains hostile because women are excluded.
The regional comparison sharpens the diagnosis. In Nepal, constitutional mandates and electoral restructuring produced women’s representation at scale, with women holding around 41 percent of local government positions and roughly one-third of parliamentary seats following enforced quota systems. These outcomes did not emerge organically, but were the result of institutional compulsion that reshaped party behaviour. Bangladesh’s reliance on voluntary reform has delivered symbolism, not power.
The contrast is telling. In the civil service, where entry and promotion are rule-bound, women now occupy leadership roles in significant numbers. In politics, where access depends on discretion, loyalty networks, and informal bargaining, women remain marginal. This is the result of institutional design, rather than a failure of capacity, ambition or preparation.
Women’s expanding economic space has been demonstrably virtuous for Bangladesh. As of December 2024, over four crore people have accounts with microfinance institutions, 90 percent of whom are women. Meanwhile, women’s labour sustains the export-oriented RMG sector that underpins national growth. These gains were achieved through decades of negotiation—between the state, NGOs, civil society, and women themselves—to normalise women’s visibility, mobility and authority in public life.
But the backlash we are now witnessing threatens to arrest that trajectory at the threshold of politics. If women’s negotiated space continues to stop at economic participation and bureaucratic service, without extending into electoral power, Bangladesh risks institutionalising a ceiling it once claimed to dismantle. Curbing this backlash is not just about symbolism or fairness, but also about ensuring that the country’s curve of investment in women does not stall at the most consequential question of all: who gets to govern.
Tasmiah T Rahman works at Innovision Consulting and is pursuing a joint PhD programme between SOAS University of London, UK, and BRAC University on the political economy of development.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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