Sitting cross-legged under a mango tree’s shade in the middle of a village in Rajshahi district, Bangladesh, I joined my colleagues and about ten women who were participating in a focus group discussion.
The fieldwork marked the beginning of our in-depth research on gaps and constraints to women’s economic empowerment in Bangladesh for the just-released World Bank report,
My focus is gender equality in household asset ownership—a crucial element for women’s economic empowerment—and one of the four pillars of the
We asked the women in the group if they owned any assets and a common response we received was along the lines of, “People here are poor. We have no land. Women have earrings, nose pins or small necklaces.
No women own any land in their name.” Similarly, Voices to Choices finds from analysis of quantitative data that far fewer women than men own agricultural land in Bangladesh.
As a few women picked up their dupattas to wipe beads of sweat off their foreheads, I pressed our facilitator, Shameem, to dig deeper and uncover more about their economic rights and inheritance. He asked the participants if they had received any assets from their parents, and almost all of them said yes. Nazneen, a 30-year-old mother of two, shared her story: When she got married, her husband had no productive assets, including land for farming. She used funds from her father and bought a piece of land for her husband.
When asked why she did not register the land under her name, Nazneen responded that the community would not like it and would query, “Why does a woman need to own assets?” Nazneen also thought that if the land was registered in her name, the community would not honor her husband, and her family would be the subject of gossip. In her case, when the land was registered in her husband’s name, they were making joint decisions about buying and selling land.
In fact, Norms often prevent women from directly owning agricultural land; it is more permissible for women to have just some of these rights. As a result, gender gaps in rights over assets are narrower than gaps in ownership.
A random breeze cooled us down, bringing the all-too-familiar smell of the ongoing mango season. The group agreed that Women in the focus group who earn income tended to present themselves differently, spoke more convincingly, and were valued by others. Nazneen’s husband accepted her opinions because of her wealth.
Selima’s story, on the other hand, underscores the vulnerability of women’s asset ownership. Voices to Choices finds that as a woman often acquires use of land rights through her relationship to a man – usually a husband or a father – those rights are subject to continuation of that relationship. Changes in relationship status can jeopardize women’s rights over property and other assets. Selima’s husband sold all of his assets, went to Dhaka, and married a second wife. She now has no contact with him and has never received any child support.