According to a recent study analysis, 81 per cent women cannot take up jobs outside home due to their pressure of household chores.
The same analysis has found that 48 per cent men cannot do employment generating work due to their ongoing studies.聽
Development organisation SAJIDA Foundation鈥檚 senior research adviser Sajeda Amin, who is a member of the study team, mentioned the data, while presenting the findings of the study titled 鈥楥are responsibilities and women鈥檚 work in Bangladesh鈥� conducted by the Institute of Development Studies at a seminar in Dhaka city on Monday.
At the event held at the BIDS auditorium at Agargaon, Sajeda Amin, presenting the keynote speech, also mentioned that women spent up to four times more time on household chores than men, with young women aged 15鈥�24 spending 20 hours a week compared with five hours by men, while even women over 65 devoted twice as much time as men to housework.
The study, conducted mainly analysing the data from the 2016 Labour Force Survey, also revealed the positive impact of joint family on women employment, saying that living in joint families enabled women鈥檚 income generating employment by reducing care burden.
鈥榃omen in joint families get two hours more for productive work and spend about three hours less on household chores, which gives them the opportunity to work outside home,鈥� said Sajeda.
The analysis also found that women鈥檚 labour force participation rates were increasing in the rural areas, while declining in the urban settings, said Sajeda, noting that the declining trend could largely be explained by their preference for home-based work, as rural areas offered greater scope through informal, agriculture-based opportunities.
Chair of the seminar, BIDS director general Professor AK Enamul Haque said that female garment workers over 30 years old tended to move to rural areas to enrol their children in schools, as they could not afford the cost of schooling in urban areas, which might contribute to the increased female labour force participation in rural areas.
Stressing the demand-side factor, BIDS former research director Rushidan Islam Rahman said that the demand for female workers needed to increase to boost their participation in the labour market.聽
As policy implications, the study recommended better support for informal work and short-term contract-based jobs or 鈥榞ig economy鈥� rather than an exclusive focus on the formal sector, policies to delay marriage and child birth for women to boost workforce participation, integration of the care economy into labour policy design, and addressing the gender division of labour in households.聽聽
UN Women deputy representative Navanita Sinha attended the event as chief guest.
The other researchers of the study are Mahir A Rahman and Nahian Azad Shashi.
When asked, Sajeda Amin explained that the study began in 2020, focusing on the labour survey of 2016, which was the latest of the time and so could not cover the latest 2022 labour force survey.
