The numbers from this year’s Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and equivalent examinations tell a striking story about Bangladesh’s girls. Like in the past eight years, female students have once again outperformed their male counterparts in SSC examinations, and this year the gap widened substantially: the pass rate among girls is 66.68 percent, while that among boys is 57.86 percent, a difference of 8.82 percentage points. Girls also secured 63,896 GPA-5 results, compared to 52,780 among boys. In absolute numbers, 607,939 female candidates passed, compared to 530,938 male candidates, even though more boys had sat for the exams.
Despite these encouraging figures, it remains a puzzle why girls’ educational advantage does not translate proportionately into better employment opportunities, higher incomes, greater professional advancement, and stronger representation in leadership.
Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in girls’ education, moving from a situation in which girls were significantly disadvantaged in accessing education to one in which they have achieved, and in many respects exceeded, educational parity (particularly at the primary level). Yet, the transition from education to economic participation remains deeply unequal. According to the final report of the latest Labour Force Survey, labour force participation rate among women was 38.40 percent while that among men was 79.96 percent in 2024. In absolute terms, only 2.29 crore women were employed in 2024, in contrast to 4.62 crore men. In other words, employment among men exceeded that of women by more than two crores. Besides, female employment has been decreasing since 2022. So why are girls, despite being successful at the beginning of their educational journey, increasingly falling out of the pipeline before reaching the most economically and institutionally powerful stages in their lives?
One of the reasons is undoubtedly family responsibility. This should not be understood simply as a private choice made by women. The BBS conducted the country’s first Time-Use Survey in 2021 and found that women spend an average of 11.7 hours a day on domestic and care work, compared with 1.6 hours for men, which is less than seven times that of women. This unequal burden impacts women’s careers, as time spent on unpaid domestic and care work is time that could otherwise be used for paid employment, professional development, and career advancement.
The lack of childcare centres nationwide is a crucial barrier to women’s advancement. Bangladesh has only 63 publicly funded childcare centres nationwide, run by the Department of Women Affairs under the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs. Private centres also exist, but many remain too expensive for low- and middle-income families. A 2024 study conducted to develop the government’s “Roadmap for Childcare in Bangladesh” revealed that 54 percent of parents identified inadequate childcare as a major barrier to workforce participation. Furthermore, among the women who participated in the survey, 18 percent had left their jobs, 34 percent reported lower job performance, and 13 percent had turned down job offers because of childcare constraints.
For women, a career break is rarely just a temporary pause. Time away from work can mean missing out on experience, professional networks, and opportunities for promotion. When a woman leaves her job to care for her family, she may return to find that her colleagues have moved ahead while her own career stagnated. As a result, the same family responsibility, for which men are not taking leave, can affect men’s and women’s careers very differently.
But family responsibility alone does not explain the gap between male and female employment. According to Bangladesh Sample Vital Statistics 2022, among Bangladeshis aged 15 to 24 years, 61.71 percent of women versus 18.59 percent of men are not in education, employment, or training (NEET). A gap of this size suggests that structural barriers and social expectations matter as much as individual choice, even before marriage or motherhood become factors.
Women also often face restrictions on mobility, concerns about workplace safety, occupational segregation, and discrimination. While some portion of the NEET data may reflect individual preference, when the disparity in NEET is this large and seen this early in terms of age, preference alone cannot explain it. So instead of asking why girls cannot shine later in life, we should try to answer why society captures less of the potential that girls demonstrate so clearly when in school.
The problem is not a shortage of talented women. Their consistent success in examinations demonstrates that clearly. Nor do men suddenly become more capable after leaving school. Rather, the rules which determine success change. At school, individual effort and academic performance are heavily rewarded. In professional life, success also depends on uninterrupted career trajectories, mobility, networks, time, and institutional support. If those resources are distributed unequally, educational equality cannot produce equal outcomes.
This matters as an economic issue, not only as a question of gender justice. When an educated woman leaves the labour market prematurely, Bangladesh loses more than her individual income. It loses part of the return on the educational investment made by her family, community, and state. That is why childcare should not be treated as a family matter alone, because affordable and accessible childcare enables parents, particularly mothers, to participate in the labour market. Bangladesh needs to treat childcare as part of its economic and employment infrastructure, not simply as a welfare service.
The government should expand affordable childcare beyond the existing 63 centres, ensure that employers comply with the childcare requirements under Section 94 of the Labour Act, 2006, create opportunities for women to return to work after career breaks, and make workplaces and transportation safer for women. Besides, a fairer sharing of unpaid domestic work within households is necessary.
The solution is not simply to tell girls to study harder. They are already doing so. The challenge is to ensure that they can retain their performance throughout their academic journey and into their careers as adults. Bangladesh has already demonstrated that it can change the educational trajectory of an entire generation of girls. We must now ensure that the girl who wins the examination race does not become the woman who is forced to withdraw from the career race. The real measure of Bangladesh’s success will not be how many girls top the board examination at age 15 or 16; it will be how many of them are still thriving, earning, leading, and making decisions 20 years later.
Mst Asma Mahmud is a senior civil judge and MPhil fellow in the Institute of Bangladesh Studies at the University of Rajshahi.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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