stop reporter:

In 2025, for the first time, Bangladesh put a price on the work women do for free. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics found that unpaid household and care work was worth Tk 6.7 trillion in 2021, about 18.9% of GDP, and that women performed 85% of it. For millions of mothers, that figure only confirmed what they already knew: the economy runs on their labour, and it pays them nothing.

For many women here, becoming a mother means compromising a career. Parenthood should be a shared blessing, yet the emotional and physical burden falls mostly on the mother. In a culture that treats motherhood as a woman’s real job and duty, whether or not she chooses it, returning to work with the same drive is hard. Before long, a career can start to feel like a side pursuit, because caring for the child is assumed to be hers alone. A BRAC analysis found that nearly 75% of 1,200 mid-career women who applied for a BRAC employment programme had previously quit jobs due to domestic responsibilities (38.8%) or motherhood (36%). And the expectation does not lift for women who do work; they are still expected to shoulder a disproportionate share of chores at home. The burden simply doubles. Even a man’s hours of rest are, in effect, subsidised by the unpaid labour of the women around him.

What deepens the problem is the cultural glorification of women’s sacrifice as mothers and sisters. What women are taught to give out of love often works as quiet emotional pressure, and this sacrificial image serves the patriarchal order by making the whole arrangement look natural. The cost is measurable, and it is national. Even as the country celebrates women joining the workforce, their participation still sits at only about 44%, against roughly 80% for men, and unpaid duty at home is a major reason for the gap. When capable women are pulled out of paid work to provide “out of love,” it holds back both their own aspirations and the economy. Why can this responsibility not be shared by fathers and other family members, when all of them benefit from one person’s silent, unpaid sacrifice?

The picture turns darker in lower-income households. In many, both partners work to earn a living, yet the domestic chores remain the woman’s alone, and failure to meet that expectation can turn violent. This is not a rare edge case. The BBS Violence Against Women Survey 2024 found that 70% of women in Bangladesh have experienced at least one form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime, and 41% in the past year alone. In some homes the strain reaches further still, with women serving as the primary breadwinner while also supporting unemployed or drug-dependent husbands.
The Business Standard

This reality is not confined to the poor. It appears in so-called educated, elite, and middle-class families too. Despite holding real careers and degrees, many ambitious women struggle to keep control of their own income. Running the household alone is expected, and so, quietly, is surrendering their financial independence. That surrender has a name in the data: the same national survey records controlling behaviour as the most common form of abuse, affecting 68% of women, with economic control counted as violence in its own right. Such cases expose not only the unequal distribution of care work but the structural inequalities that persist year after year. Women are rarely given the option to refuse; opting out is simply not on the table. That closes doors for the next generation of girls, tying their worth to sacrifice rather than ability. Worse, most families do not even acknowledge it. A lifetime of labour with no recognition or reward, carried alongside the quiet grief of unreached potential, is a heavy thing to hold. And so, the moment a woman offers an opinion or joins a discussion, she hears it: “GO TO THE KITCHEN.” Misogyny, lurking as sarcasm.
Unfpa

None of this is fixed in stone. The same care can be shared: fathers taking real parental leave, employers offering childcare and flexible hours, and public policy that finally counts unpaid work, which the government has only just begun to do. Care is not a private favour women owe their families. It is economic infrastructure, and treating it as anything less costs the whole country.

By:
Adiba Noshin Mithi
Undergraduate student, Department of Development Studies, University of Dhaka; Intern at the Applied Democracy Lab (ADL), University of Dhaka.
Email: adibanoshin2002@gmail.com