Beyond the Double Shift: Women's Entrepreneurship and Empowerment in Bangladesh

This study critically examines women’s entrepreneurship and empowerment in Bangladesh through a feminist and cultural lens, focusing on how digital innovation intersects with traditional gender norms to reshape women’s economic participation. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines secondary literature with a primary survey of 58 female entrepreneurs, the paper explores key drivers, barriers, and socio-cultural dynamics underpinning women’s entrepreneurial journeys. Findings reveal that women are increasingly using digital platforms—especially Facebook commerce—to establish home-based enterprises that balance economic aspirations with cultural expectations. Motivation is multidimensional, blending financial necessity, passion, and flexibility. Despite progress, structural constraints—limited access to credit, inadequate training, domestic pressures, and gendered institutional biases—continue to restrict empowerment. Most respondents report enhanced financial independence and social recognition, but retain limited control over financial decisions, revealing partial rather than transformative empowerment. The analysis interprets these outcomes through feminist theoretical frameworks to argue that entrepreneurship in Bangladesh represents a negotiated form of agency within patriarchal and neoliberal structures. Digital entrepreneurship offers adaptive empowerment but also reproduces inequalities through online precarity and algorithmic exclusion. The paper concludes that sustainable empowerment demands systemic interventions—gender-responsive financial inclusion, institutional reform, and collective feminist solidarity—beyond the rhetoric of individual success. Women’s entrepreneurship in Bangladesh thus emerges as a site of both constraint and possibility within evolving postcolonial modernity.