Economic Pathways to Women’s Empowerment and Active Citizenship: What Does The Evidence From Bangladesh Tell Us?

This paper sets out to explore economic pathways to women’s empowerment and active citizenship in Bangladesh, a country where the denial of economic resources to women, and their resulting status as lifelong dependents on men, has long been seen as foundational to their subordinate status. While empowerment entails change in the lives of individual women and their interpersonal relations, the concept of active citizenship draws attention to women’s capacity to participate in the public life of their community. The paper draws on the existing literature on women’s access to various forms of paid work both to assess their impact in terms of empowerment and citizenship and to understand better the processes by which these changes might occur.