Does Workforce Participation Empower Women? Micro-Level Evidence from Urban Bangladesh

Empirical studies on the impact of women’s paid jobs on their empowerment and welfare in Bangladesh are mostly confined to the garment workers. Besides, these studies seldom control for non-working women and/or apply any statistical techniques to control for the effects of other pertinent determinants of women’s empowerment and welfare. This study overcomes these drawbacks and presents alternative assessments of the link between women’s workforce participation and empowerment on the basis of survey data from the two largest cities in Bangladesh. While the generic assessment indicates that women’s paid jobs have positive implications for women’s participation in decisions on fertility, children’s education and health care as well as their possession and control of resources, the econometric assessment negates most of these observations. Women’s education, on the other hand, appears to be more important than their participation in the labour force. The study argues that by omitting other relevant explanatory variables from the analysis, the previous studies might have overestimated the impact of women’s paid work on their empowerment.