The Missing Infrastructure behind Women’s Economic Independence
A country can spend years telling women to become educated, skilled and economically independent.
But if, after completing their education, a woman still has to ask who will look after her child before she can accept a job, something is fundamentally wrong with the way that society understands development.
Bangladesh has invested considerably in educating women and encouraging their participation in the workforce.
Yet the country continues to lose a large part of the economic value created by that investment.
According to an International Labour Organization report based on the 2023 Labour Force Survey, women constitute around 35 percent of the highly educated population, but only 5 percent of these highly educated women are employed.
The figure is startling not simply because it describes women’s employment. It tells us something about the distance between educational achievement and economic opportunity in Bangladesh.
There are many explanations for this gap. Discrimination, occupational segregation, unequal wages, unsafe workplaces and limited opportunities for advancement all matter.
But there is another factor that receives considerably less attention because it happens mostly inside homes rather than offices: childcare.
For many women, employment does not begin with a job interview. It begins with a much more basic question: where will the child stay while the mother is at work?
That question is becoming harder to answer as Bangladesh’s traditional family structure changes.
The extended family that once absorbed much of the responsibility of caring for children is gradually giving way to smaller nuclear households, particularly in urban areas.
A working couple may live several kilometres away from their parents, while grandparents may themselves be working, elderly or living elsewhere.
The old informal childcare system is therefore disappearing without being adequately replaced by a formal one.
The consequences are not confined to women who are already employed. Childcare can determine whether a woman enters the labour market at all.
A woman may possess a university degree, professional training and the willingness to work, yet the absence of affordable and reliable childcare can make employment economically or practically impossible.
In such circumstances, what looks from outside like a woman’s decision not to work may actually be a decision forced by the absence of alternatives.
The ILO’s findings make the larger problem even clearer. In 2023, the employment rate was 77.9 percent for men and 40.2 percent for women.
Women were also much less likely to be engaged in wage employment. Meanwhile, women who do earn wages spend an average of 27.7 hours a week on household chores, compared with 7.6 hours for men.
Their combined weekly workload from paid and unpaid work was also considerably higher.
This is why childcare should not be treated merely as a women’s welfare issue. It is an economic infrastructure issue.
We do not normally ask whether roads are a women’s issue before building them.
We do not ask whether electricity is relevant only to women before extending the grid. We understand that infrastructure enables economic activity.
Childcare performs a similar function, although its value is less visible because much of it takes place behind closed doors.
A functioning daycare centre can therefore do more than look after children. It can make a workplace accessible to a mother.
It can allow a trained woman to remain in her profession instead of abandoning it.
It can prevent years of education from becoming economically dormant. It can also reduce the amount of unpaid care work that falls disproportionately on women.
Bangladesh’s present childcare infrastructure is nowhere near sufficient for this task.
The 2024 Labour Force Survey reportedly counted 2.36 crore women in the labour force, while only 64 government daycare centres were available, with capacity for just over 4,000 children.
Applications frequently exceed available places, and some centres remain practically invisible because people do not know they exist.
The price difference between public and private childcare makes the problem even sharper. Public centres can charge relatively modest fees, but their reach is limited.
Private facilities, meanwhile, can cost several times more. For an affluent family, this may be an inconvenience.
For a middle-income or lower-income household, it can determine whether the mother’s salary is worth earning at all. If childcare consumes a large portion of a woman’s income, the labour market quietly creates a penalty for motherhood.
There is an uncomfortable irony here. Bangladesh wants more women to participate in the economy, but the economic system often assumes that the care of children will somehow happen for free.
It will not.
Someone pays for childcare even when no bill is issued. The payment may come in the form of a woman’s abandoned career, reduced working hours, slower promotion, lost income or years of professional experience.
It may also come through exhaustion, as women combine paid employment with a disproportionate share of domestic responsibilities.
The absence of a childcare bill does not mean there is no economic cost. It simply means that the cost is being transferred to families, and disproportionately to women.
The gender wage gap must therefore be understood alongside the care economy. The ILO reports that women in Bangladesh earn, on average, 22 to 25 percent less than men, while women’s representation in management remains only 6.2 percent.
The report also identifies differences in occupations, sectors, working hours and household responsibilities as factors associated with the wage gap.
This suggests that the childcare debate cannot be separated from the broader question of what kind of labour market Bangladesh wants to build.
If the government is serious about increasing women’s employment, childcare facilities should be planned alongside industrial zones, offices, universities, hospitals and other major employment centres.
Public institutions should have functioning childcare arrangements.
Large employers should be encouraged, and where appropriate required, to provide or finance accessible facilities. Urban planning should consider childcare as part of the basic infrastructure of working neighbourhoods.
The government has reportedly begun planning additional daycare facilities, including a project for 60 centres and a broader target of establishing at least 150 new centres in Dhaka and surrounding areas.
That is a useful beginning, but numbers alone will not solve the problem.
A daycare centre that exists only on paper, remains inaccessible to ordinary families or operates without adequate standards does little to solve the problem.
The question should not simply be how many centres exist, but how many working parents can realistically use them, how far they have to travel, how much they cost and whether parents can trust the quality of care.
There is also a cultural question that needs to be confronted. Childcare is still too often imagined as the mother’s responsibility, with everyone else merely helping her.
That assumption quietly reproduces the very inequality that employment policies are supposed to reduce.
A child has two parents, and a functioning society has a collective interest in ensuring that caring for that child does not become an obstacle to one parent’s economic independence.
Bangladesh cannot afford to treat educated women as an achievement statistic and then leave them stranded at the threshold of the labour market.
Education creates human capital, but human capital creates economic value only when people are able to participate.
The childcare crisis is therefore not simply about where children stay during office hours.
It is about whether Bangladesh is willing to build an economy in which women can convert education into employment, employment into income, and income into independence.
(The writer is an Academic, Journalist, and Political Analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT. He can be reached at nazmulalam.rijohn@gmail.com)
