Rural women\\\'s economic empowerment

Bangladesh is predominantly a rural economy with about 80 per cent of the people living in rural areas. Women constitute nearly half of the total population and half of its potential. For ages they have been the co-builders of civilisations alongside men, but are deprived all over the world today --- especially in developing countries like Bangladesh.
The life of women in Bangladesh is dominated by a patriarchal social system. Such a system upholds a rigid division of labour that controls women's mobility, roles and responsibilities and procreation. Traditionally, a woman in Bangladesh derives her status from her family. Her roles include the maintenance of the family as a social institution and as an economic entity. Most importantly, through childbearing and child rearing, she ensures the existence of succeeding generations. Disparities between men and women in education, health, employment and income opportunities, control over assets, personal security and participation in political process reveal that women are deprived and less empowered, which constraints the country's ability to achieve its full potential. Despite national and international-level interventions, the status of women in Bangladesh is not yet up to the mark. According to the United Nations gender related development index (GDI), Bangladesh was ranked at 112 out of total 144 countries worldwide in 2003 (UNDP-2003).
Rural women throughout Asia and the Pacific region make critical contributions to household production and, consequently, to household and national food security. Although the specific nature of their contribution varies among the various Asian and Pacific countries, clearly the majority of Bangladesh rural women take on an increasing share of household labour, and their lives are characterised by mounting drudgery. Various studies carried out in different countries in the region provide important findings on gender-roles to guide policies and programme interventions that will improve the productivity of rural households. The lack of a systematic synthesis of the findings hinders efforts to build a realistic scenario of rural women's roles in household food security. However, a general pattern of gender-roles emerges from these studies indicating that both rural men and rural women in Asia and the Pacific, including Bangladesh in particular, contribute to farm and home production.
TWO BROAD CATEGORIES: In the context of economic, political, socio-cultural and ethnic diversity in Bangladesh, the factors shaping rural women's work and their economic and social contributions can be grouped into two broad categories, namely: those embedded in the community and those embedded within the household. In the make-up of a community, the economic production base determines rural women's work in the various segments of production. Bangladesh rural women actively contribute to community production, thus improving social linkages and kinship relationships and facilitating resource exchange in times of need.
In the household nexus, the traditional gender-role ideology, founded on cultural and religious tenets, determines rural women's participation in household production. Contributions made by women within the household increasingly are affected by changes external to the household. For instance, rural poverty has acted as a push factor, whereas new economic opportunities outside the household have emerged as pull factors encouraging rural women to cross customary gender-role boundaries and to participate in the economy outside the household, often in farm production and off-farm production. But this is also part of the reality that although recent trends in agricultural diversification accompanied by commercialisation and marketisation have generated opportunities for off-farm paid work, Bangladesh rural women's poor educational attainment, inadequate training and social immobility often have prevented them from responding to these opportunities. Even though short-term internal migration induced by Bangladesh's subsistence economy and seasonal dimensions of agricultural production sometimes bring new work patterns for rural women, certain gender-roles in household production tend to remain inexorably fixed. Across the country, work inside the home space that involves family care giving is almost always seen as women's work. The women are primary care givers and domestic workers within the household space in every stage of the life-cycle and this responsibility of care giving is expanded to serve the community's needs too.
WORK PATTERNS: In general, rural women's work patterns are marked by change and continuity, as well as flexibility and rigidity. Change and flexibility are characterised by women taking on new roles in farm production, off-farm production and community production to ensure the family's access to food and household resources. Continuity and rigidity relate to social norms that define gender-roles and dictate that rural women and girls should assume home production responsibilities in rural households. The intra-household decisions on allocation of labour often are biased and relegate domestic tasks to women and girls. In Bangladesh, tradition-driven socialisation defines the tasks and taboos in the economic and social spheres among rural women. Increasingly, faced with economic pressure, gender-roles may become flexible to enable women to engage in work traditionally regarded as belonging to the male domain. However, the rigid gender-role definitions dictate that men should not perform household tasks.
In Bangladesh, participation in economic activities varies considerably according to gender, the type of activity and the place of residence. Rural women traditionally have played an important role in a wide range of income-generating activities. These rural production activities include post-harvesting, cow fattening and milking, goat farming, backyard poultry rearing, pisciculture, agriculture, horticulture, food processing, cane and bamboo works, silk reeling, handloom weaving, garment making, fishnet making, coir production and handicraft. A significant number of rural women, particularly from the extremely poor landless households, also engage in paid labour in construction, earthwork and field-based agricultural work, activities that traditionally have fallen within the male domain. The tradition of female seclusion is overlooked as well as their possible role in providing for the economic needs of the family. Unpaid family workers, among whom women are disproportionately represented, are a major source of labour in the agriculture sector in Bangladesh.
A study on the intra-household organisation of rice production found that the extent to which male and female household members are involved in irrigated agriculture and irrigation management is actually related to the amount of land owned by the households. It notes that female family labour plays a more important role in rice production than the male family labour, and points to differences among households in different economic categories. For instance, a higher percentage of female labourers from middle-class households are involved in rice production - mostly transplanting and crop processing tasks - compared to marginal farmer households. In the middle-class strata, women in Hindu male-headed households contribute 54 per cent of all labour to rice production, compared to 31 per cent in Muslim male-headed households. Apart from the traditional crop processing tasks, female family labour also is used for making seedbeds, uprooting seedlings and transplanting, fertilising, weeding and harvesting, all traditional male activities. Women, almost equal to the contribution of male family labour, carry out some 40 to 50 per cent of field irrigation and non-farm water management.
According to a number of reports, the country's focus on giving women better health and more economic autonomy has had a significant impact on rural household incomes, poverty reduction and increased educational enrolment, particularly for females who usually lag behind males in Bangladesh. The Economist (Nov 3, 2012) notes that "both the boom in the textile industry and the arrival of micro-credit have, over the past 20 years, put money into women's pockets-from which it is more likely to be spent on health, education and better food".
The RMG industry in Bangladesh, regarded as the key to its economic growth, employs nearly 4.0 million people, most of whom, about 80 per cent, are women coming from the rural areas. There is a hefty volume of literature supporting the relationship between rural women's economic empowerment in Bangladesh and its
sustained growth trajectory.
The writer is a retired Professor               of Economics, BCS General Education Cadre.                                     [email protected]