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

This paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data 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. 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.

This work is part of the ‘Choice, constraints and the gender dynamics of labour markets in Bangladesh’ project supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and the UK Department for International Development.

Citation

Kabeer, N., Mahmud, S. & Tasneem, S. The Contested Relationship Between Paid Work and Women’s Empowerment: Empirical Analysis from Bangladesh. Eur J Dev Res (2018) 30: 235. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-017-0119-y

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

Published 13 November 2017