The debate about the relationship between paid work and women’s position within the family
and society is a long standing one. Some argue that women’s integration into the market is
the key to their empowerment while others offer more sceptical, often pessimistic, accounts
of this relationship. These contradictory viewpoints reflect a variety of factors: variations in
how empowerment itself is understood, variations in the cultural meanings and social
acceptability of paid work for women across different contexts and the nature of the available
work opportunities within particular contexts. This paper uses a combination of survey data
and qualitative interviews to explore the impact of paid work on various indicators of women’s
empowerment ranging from shifts in intra-household decision-making processes to women’s
participation in public life. It finds that forms of work that offer regular and relatively
independent incomes hold out the greater transformative potential. In addition, it highlights a
range of other factors that also appear to contribute to women’s voice and agency in the
context of Bangladesh.
Keywords: gender, paid work, empowerment, informality
