Women-Friendly Working Environment in Bangladesh: Critical Analysis

Introduction

Over the last two decades, increasing numbers of women have been entering the workforce around the world, particularly in Bangladesh. Gender inequality in labor markets remains a persistent phenomenon where women continue to disproportionately face a range of multiple challenges relating to access to employment, choice of work, working conditions, employment security, wage discrimination, and balancing the competing burdens of work and family responsibilities. Where women’s talents are sometimes wasted because they avoid competitive work environments, it seems important to know which types of work environments are attractive to them. Traditional gender norms, labor market segregation and unbalanced power relations and access to skills and resources have all led to women as the “secondary workforce” – within labor markets, they are treated as flexible and expendable workers and within households as “added workers” (Kabeer, 2008). Although there is no evidence to support the contention that women are less efficient than men, as there are few differences between men and women in cognitive abilities and skills. Bangladesh is experiencing a more than proportionate increase in the female labor force, a process often defined as feminization of the labor force (Standing, 1985).

Though international human rights instruments and national laws have provided right to work in a safe and healthy environment but women still face discrimination in the workplace. However, data shows that women’s participation is far from satisfactory and the implementation of the special measures provided by the labor act is questionable. Despite that, women in Bangladesh quite often encounter more obstacles than men in workplaces, and are treated unequally in their terms and conditions of employment. The unequal as well as disempowering environment is explicit both in women’s participation in labor market and also in trade unions (Elson, 1999). Gender-balance or women-friendly environment in working world is still a myth in our country. Therefore time has come to chalk out what are the specific obstacles working women are facing in formal and informal sector jobs and what are the specific measures or policies can be taken to ensure women friendly working environment in Bangladesh; which in long run will encourage women to join and climb higher in workforce. Improvement of women’s situation cannot be achieved without an understanding of the difficulties they face and the needs they have. This is what this study has attempted to unearth. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to fulfill the need for a comprehensive review of the literature surrounding the issues of equity and access in the workplace from a feminist perspective.