ON APRIL 20, BNP named 36 women for parliament’s reserved seats. The Jamaat-led alliance named 13. With that, one of the most momentous decisions about women’s representation in Bangladesh’s new parliament was made — quietly, quickly and with far less public scrutiny than it deserves.
This time, however, the debate should not begin with dismissal. Many of the nominees appear qualified, and BNP’s list suggests an effort to reflect diversity. That is welcome. But now comes the harder question: what are these seats for? If reserved seats are treated as political rewards, Bangladesh will get symbolism. If they are treated as a responsibility, the country may get lawmakers who actually use their office to shape policy, demand accountability and defend women’s interests.
That is the real issue now. Once these women enter parliament, will they function as lawmakers or as symbols? Will they shape policy, question ministries, monitor budgets and push for reform? Or will reserved seats once again be treated as a quieter corner of politics, where presence matters more than performance?
This question matters because women remain severely underrepresented in directly elected politics. Reserved seats still exist because the general electoral field does not yet offer women equal access to political power. That makes these nominations important. But it also means the public should demand more from them, not less. Bangladesh has spent too long debating who gets these seats and too little time debating what they should do with them. A reserved seat should not be a political thank-you gift, a mark of loyalty or a symbolic gesture. It is a working office.
Other countries show that women’s representation matters most when women in parliament treat office as a mandate to act. In Rwanda, for example, women parliamentarians built cross-party cooperation through the Rwandan Women’s Parliamentary Forum, founded in 1996. That platform helped women legislators coordinate around legal reform and Rwanda later adopted a landmark gender-based violence law in 2008. Today, women hold 56.3 per cent of seats in Rwanda’s Chamber of Deputies. Mexico offers another lesson: a 2014 constitutional reform required gender parity in congressional candidacies; in 2018, women won half the seats in Congress; and in 2019, legislators expanded that principle through the ‘parity in everything’ reform. In the United Kingdom, the Women and Equalities Committee, first appointed in 2015, was created to scrutinise government policy and hold institutions accountable on equality law and policy. The point is not that Bangladesh should copy these countries mechanically. It is that women’s representation becomes politically meaningful when it is organised, purposeful and tied to lawmaking and oversight.
So, what should the newly nominated women MPs actually do?
First, they should form a strong cross-party women’s caucus from the very beginning of the parliamentary term. If women legislators elsewhere have been able to work across party lines on issues affecting women and families, there is no reason Bangladeshi women MPs cannot do the same. Violence against women, maternal health, childcare, workplace protection, girls’ education, transport safety and digital harassment are not minor side issues. They are major national issues. Bangladesh’s 2024 national violence against women survey found that seven in 10 ever-married women have experienced at least one form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime, and four in 10 faced it in the previous 12 months. Child marriage also remains alarmingly high: 51 per cent of women aged 20–24 were married before 18. Maternal mortality, though improved, was still 136 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023. These are not peripheral concerns. They are central tests of whether parliament is responding to women’s actual lives.
Second, these MPs should become visible through work, not ceremony. The public should know which committees they serve on, what questions they raise, what bills they support and what policy issues they consistently pursue. And the issues are not hard to identify. They could push for full implementation of the Child Daycare Centre Act, 2021, for example, because a 2025 policy study noted that the law exists, but effective childcare systems still lag badly in practice. They could take up workplace and educational safety as the government moves towards codifying stronger sexual-harassment protections after years of relying mainly on court directives. They could also engage one of the most politically charged women’s issues in Bangladesh today: women’s fairer inheritance and property rights, which drew national attention in May 2025 when more than 20,000 Hefazat supporters rallied in Dhaka against proposed reforms. Accountability, in other words, should mean visible work on concrete questions: daycare, safety, workplace dignity and property rights.
Third, they should focus on budgets, not only speeches. It is easy for parties and governments to praise women’s empowerment in abstract terms. It is harder to secure funding for shelters, legal aid, maternal care, school safety, childcare support and protection from workplace harassment. In the FY2025–26 budget, Bangladesh’s gender budget fell to Tk 260,767 crore from Tk 271,818.6 crore the year before. The allocation for the ministry of women and children affairs also fell from Tk 5,222 crore to Tk 5,078 crore. If women MPs are serious about treating their seats as a responsibility, one of the simplest questions they should ask every budget season is whether current spending is remotely enough for women’s safety, care and economic security at scale.
Fourth, the women MPs should widen the meaning of representation. They should amplify the concerns of rural women, working-class women, minority women, indigenous women, women with disabilities and women facing everyday institutional neglect. That matters because these groups do not face the same barriers in the same way. Child marriage remains higher in rural Bangladesh than in urban areas. Recent budget reporting also cited findings that Bangladesh lost 21 lakh jobs between July and December 2024, with 85 per cent of those losses borne by women. And a 2025 UN Women rapid gender analysis found that women with disabilities are often deprived of property rights and face deep insecurity, with 75 per cent of surveyed persons with disabilities reporting insecurity, 71 per cent anxiety and 67 per cent depression. A parliament that speaks about ‘women’ only in the abstract will miss the inequalities inside women’s lives.
Political parties also have responsibilities. They should support these MPs with training in lawmaking, budget review, negotiation and committee work. And they should stop treating reserved seats as a substitute for nominating more women in winnable general seats. They are not a substitute. They are, at best, a partial correction.
The women MPs nominated on April 20 now have an opportunity and an obligation to prove that reserved seats are not honorary positions. If they speak boldly, organise seriously, monitor government closely and legislate with purpose, reserved seats can become more than symbolic compensation for exclusion. They can become a platform for substantive representation. But if these seats are treated as quiet rewards after the real contest is over, Bangladesh will once again confuse women’s presence with women’s power.
Tasnia Symoom is a political scientist and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on democratic institutions, governance and violence against women.
