Nobonita Chowdhury
Being an urban Bangladeshi woman in 2016 is considered to be a privilege. We didn’t have to grow up in the era our mothers and grandmothers did. We have access to basic civil rights and have a wider range of career choices than our previous generation could have ever imagined. More importantly: we have the freedom to enter the work force; a privilege which a majority of women from the previous generations didn’t have. Sure, we still have problems like the gender biased wage gap and poor maternity leave in private companies. But that doesn’t mean that we still haven’t come a long way.
The root problem of the still prevalent gender inequality in our urban society lies within the gender biased mindset that still influences a large portion of the daily lives of urban women. For instance, even though most married urban women are usually allowed to work, they are still expected by their family members to fully contribute in domestic work.
On the other hand, the married urban man does not necessarily have to contribute to housework at all, even if he is working the same office hours as his wife. In this aspect, the married woman actually ends up doing double the amount of work in comparison to the man, but gets half the reward for it.
Then there is also the matter of in-laws. In Bangladesh, joint families are still widely prevalent. And it is only natural that a married woman, whether it be a working woman or a homemaker, is expected to do her best to please her in-laws. In many cases, the in-laws place a lot of restrictions on the bride of the house. This is a traditional mindset that still has yet to dissolve. So while the married woman is not legally refrained from pursuing anything, at the end of the day she ends up refraining in order to maintain peace within the family.
In many cases, married women end up quitting their job after childbirth because they are the ones expected to take care of the child. Although many grandparents nowadays do babysit their grandchildren when the mother is at work, sending your child to daycare is still socially frowned upon. And often times the husband does not share the burden of raising the child which results into more responsibility being dumped on the mother.
These problems may seem trivial, but the impact it has on the women facing them is not. If such problems which mainly rise from the cultural mindset can be changed a little at a time, we might not be too far away from providing urban Bangladeshi women with the freedom they truly deserve.