We agree with Speaker Major (retd) Hafiz Uddin Ahmed that giving women the opportunity to win 100 parliamentary seats through direct elections, rather than confining them to the existing reserved-seat system, is the way forward if we care about genuine political empowerment of women.
As this newspaper noted in our previous editorial, "Where are the women leaders?," Bangladesh's democratic landscape suffers from a staggering deficit of female decision-makers. That in the 2026 parliamentary election, women secured a dismal seven general seats is simply unacceptable, and that more is not being done to rectify this glaring issue is a failure of the state.
The message is unmistakable: While women stand at the vanguard of street movements and grassroots campaigns, patriarchal party structures systematically lock them out when power is distributed.
For far too long, the reserved-seat mechanism has been used by major political parties as a convenient smokescreen to avoid nominating women for general constituencies. This must end.
Appointed rather than elected, reserved-seat lawmakers frequently lack direct constituency authority and are treated as secondary actors in legislative chambers.
Moving toward 100 directly elected seats for women would shatter this patronizing status quo, legitimizing female leaders through popular mandates and giving them undeniable political weight.
Empowering half the population is not merely a matter of social justice but an absolute prerequisite for national development, especially at a time when regressive beliefs threaten to infiltrate our politics.
No nation, and certainly not ours, can hope to build a resilient, modern economy while sidelining the talent, perspective, and leadership of 50% of its citizens.
We need the government, and by extension the leaders of all political parties, to move swiftly from rhetorical endorsement to constitutional and electoral reform.
Dismantling tokenism and establishing direct electoral pathways for women is an obvious, non-negotiable step forward. It is time to stop treating female representation as political charity and let women claim their rightful place as equal architects of our future.
