How Women Are Faring in Bangladeshi Labour Market?: Evidences from Labour Force Survey Data

In Bangladesh, despite of increased participation in the labour market in recent decades, women are still lagging behind men by a significant margin with the formers being concentrated mostly in low paid agriculture as well as in lower stages of occupational ladder. With the help of latest labour market data of 2016-17, this paper attempts to examine gender based occupational segregation through sectoral classification as well as skill based occupational classes. Our econometric estimation of different sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, construction and service) reflects importance of gender centric factors such as care burden and marital status in determining females’ employment status. Besides, decomposition analysis highlights that, if women would be given similar return to their endowments as that of men, their sector wise participation is expected to change in favour of relatively high paid service and industry and will fall in low paid agriculture sector. Both sector wise as well as occupation based segregation indices reflect high degree of segregation between men and women. Against the backdrop of concentration of women in low skilled jobs and low productive sector, this paper expects to provide important policy insights for boosting female employment in relatively high productive sectors and highly paid occupations while utilizing the structural shift in the labour market of Bangladesh