Bangladesh

One of the most populated countries in the world, the subject of women in Bangladesh has been a longstanding and contested. Among the poorest Asian countries, Bangladesh is situated in the Indian subcontinent [Page 123]in a riverine terrain that serves as the flood-plains for the Himalayas. Traditionally, people in this country engaged in agriculture but urbanization and outmigration has increased rapidly over the past three decades. The population is primarily Muslim, an estimated 12 percent of communities are Hindu and 3 percent are Christians, Buddhists, and others. The ratio of males to females in Bangladesh is 105.6 males per 100 females, in 2008. This low proportion of women reflects various setbacks in the status of women throughout south Asia. In recent years, gender related statistics have shown substantial improvements for women, but the condition of women remains problematic in many domains.

Among millions of others in Bangladesh, Shavala lives on $1 a day, struggling to feed her two children.

Rural female literacy was 20 percent, half of that of males at the turn of the millennium. By 2004, it rose to 46 percent, the primary gain being made by females aged 15 to 24 whose literacy has reached 71 percent in 2008. Very few women continue their education up to the tertiary level. As a result, their prospects for work are not very good. More than three-quarters of women work as unpaid family labor in agriculture. Less than a tenth are self-employed and few are contract workers. In urban areas, women are better represented in the labor force with half the women who work being paid employees. However, only two out of five women work in the formal sector, primarily in ready made garments, while most women work in the informal sector, as vendors selling food and clothes or hiring themselves out as domestic help. Occupational segregation remains high, women working in the occupations mentioned as well as in nursing, teaching, and self-employment financed through microcredit. Girls are vulnerable to trafficking and often work as child laborers, and even as child prostitutes.

Indicators such as fertility and the male-female infant mortality gap have improved vastly over the last four decades. However, health expenditures per capita reflect the low incomes in the country, with women getting far less access to healthcare than men. Bangladesh is one of the few countries where female life expectancies are lower than men's. Families feed the male members better and first. The child marriage rate is one of the highest in the world. Many girls are married by the age of 15, and their families must pay a dowry. Maternal mortality rates remain very high at 440 per 100,000, with trained attendants present at only one-third of births.

Improvements in education or health indicators are attributed to the activities of development organizations in the country. Bangladesh has seen a large amount of socioeconomic development experimentation, with a web of donor funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the country. In addition, women's issues have become part of the larger national discourse of development. In 1978, Bangladesh was one of the first developing countries to establish a Ministry of Women's Affairs.

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