Shortly after returning to Dhaka from Vancouver in early 2020, I found myself at a dinner table full of educated, professionally-accomplished men debating at length about who among their colleagues deserved a promotion to become an executive director.
Not once did a woman’s name come up.
What was at play seemed almost sinister --the invisible architecture of assumption, the unspoken consensus that leadership, by default, belongs to men.
That instinct, strikingly large across a society of more than 170 million people, is precisely what the reserved 50 seats in our parliament were designed to correct.
Yet, it remains a formidable force to counter.
According to the 2023 UN “Gender Social Norms Index,” a staggering 99.37% of Bangladeshis hold at least one measurable bias against women, with 69% believing that men make better political leaders and 88% convinced that men are more capable business executives.
Despite Bangladesh’s celebrated distinction of having women at the helm of government for over 29 of the past 54 years, the longest such record in the world the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Gender Gap Report recorded Bangladesh’s economic gender parity score at just 31.1%as it slipped from 59th to 99th position.
A nation cannot claim to champion women’s leadership at the apex while tolerating such deep inequality at its base. Given this fragmented situation, it becomes clear why reserved parliamentary seats were established and why they might be insufficient as they currently stand.
The nation began correcting gender imbalance starting from the first National Parliament with 15 reserved seats in 1972; today, there are 50.
On paper, this looks like progress. In practice, the framework of that progress has a serious structural weakness: Seats are not won. They are awarded. This award can just as easily be withheld.
In the fourth parliament of Bangladesh in 1988, there were no reserved seats for women. The result was a chamber of 300 members in which precisely four women held seats - barely more than one percent.
That grim statistic, drawn from election records compiled by the Election Commission and the Khan Foundation, tells us everything we need to know about where women in Bangladeshi politics stand when the scaffolding of affirmative action is removed.
In the wake of the latest general election, Bangladesh prepares once again for a familiar parliamentary procedure: The filling of those “reserved seats” for women.
Under the present constitutional framework, specifically Article 65(3) and formalized by the 15th Constitutional Amendment of 2011, these seats are filled not by the public, but through proportional selection by the political parties that have already secured general seats.
Though framed as a triumph for gender inclusion, these seats are increasingly filled through political patronage. As the nation contemplates its democratic future, we must ask: Are we empowering women, or are we merely expanding the ranks of party loyalists under the guise of female representation?
Five decades of reserved seats
The historical data offers critical insight alongside a stark warning.
In the first parliament of 1973-1975, women’s representation existed solely through the (then) 15 reserved seats. In the second parliament of 1979-1982, two women won directly elected seats alongside 30 in reserved seats.
By the fifth parliament in 1991-1995, five women had broken through the direct election barrier. The numbers crept upward but never broke into meaningful territory. Not once in five decades did directly elected women occupy more than 7 to 8%of the 300 general seats.
In the most recent general election, only seven women won through the general constituencies, a figure that underscores how little the reserved seat system has done to build an organic pipeline of directly elected female leaders.
The current system has reached the limits of its utility. By allowing parties to select rather than voters to elect these 50 MPs, we have effectively created a ‘two-tier’ parliament.
On one side are the 300 members with a direct mandate from the people; on the other are 50 members whose primary accountability is to the party high command that handpicked them.
The system allows to reward close associates, relatives of influential leaders, or party insiders, rather than grassroots female activists who have spent decades working in the trenches of their constituencies.
The primary argument for the current system is that it pledges a minimum level of female presence, and the cost of this undertaking is the erosion of the very foundation of public representation in the Parliament.
A woman nominated to a reserved seat lacks a specific geographical constituency as she doesn’t represent a jurisdiction where voters can hold her accountable on local roads, schools, or healthcare let alone on gender-specific issues.
Consequently, these MPs are often viewed as ‘supplementary’ members. For true gender parity in Bangladesh, female leaders should be elected on merit, not as recipients of party favours.
The power of the mandatory candidate quota
To bridge this gap, Bangladesh should look toward one of the most successful international models for gender parity: The mandatory political quota (MPQ) for women.
Unlike the current ‘reserved seat’ model, which sets aside a separate room for women after the election is over, the MPQ model integrates women into the heat of the race.
This system mandates by law that a specific percentage of the candidates a party nominates for direct election must be women.
In Mexico, for instance, the implementation of ‘parity in leadership’ laws transformed the legislature. Since 2014, Mexico has required a 50/50 gender split for all nominations to the federal and state legislatures.
The results were significant: By 2021, Mexico’s lower house achieved gender parity. These women were not selected by a committee; they won their mandates through the electoral process.
Similarly, in Argentina, as being the first country in the world to adopt a national quota law enacted in 1991, mandated that a minimum of 30% of all candidates on party lists be women and that those women be placed in winnable positions.
This mandate ensured that women moved from the periphery of ‘women’s wings’ into the core of legislative decision-making.
For Bangladesh, adopting an MPQ would mean amending the “Representation of the People Order” to require that every registered political party ensures a specific percentage of its nominees for the 300 general seats are women.
To prevent parties from assigning women solely to non-viable constituencies, legislation may incorporate placement mandates. These mandates would obligate parties to nominate women in a balanced range of strongholds as well as competitive districts.
This compels the parties to truly commit resources to training, funding, and advancing women leaders within local communities.
A reform debate long overdue
It would be misleading to suggest that no one in Bangladesh’s institutional framework has noticed this structural defect.
Following the political transition of August 2024, the interim government commissioned several reform bodies to examine the question. Both the Constitutional Reform Commission and the Electoral Reform Commission proposed increasing the number of reserved seats to 100 and holding direct elections for them.
The Women’s Affairs Reform Commission went further, recommending that parliament be expanded to 600 seats: One general and one reserved per constituency, with direct elections for both.
These were bold ideas, even if the final seat count is still up for debate.
However, the National Consensus Commission, after closed negotiations dominated by male representatives, settled on a far more modest outcome: Retain the existing 50 reserved seats without direct elections and require parties to nominate women in only 7% of general constituencies.
The proposed step-by-step plan requiring 7% women nominations in the next election, rising to 15% in the 14th national election, and increasing by 5% in each subsequent cycle until 100 women are directly elected is of course better than stagnation.
But it is a plan that does not fundamentally challenge the partisan distribution model for the present cycle. The 50 reserved seats will still be filled by party selection. The same closed rooms, the same loyalty calculus, the same absence of a public mandate.
The gap between the reform commissions’ ambition and the political consensus reached might be a measure of how far our journey has yet to prolong.
Bridging the gap
Critics often argue that a direct election for the “reserved” female MPs would be fiscally imprudent for a nation like Bangladesh.
This is a valid concern, but it should not be an excuse for stagnation.
We can achieve direct representation without the administrative or financial burden of a separate election day by adopting a ‘best-performer’ mechanism, often referred to as the ‘next-in-line’ system.
In this model, the reserved seats would be allocated to the female candidates who contested the 300 general seats but did not win. The seats would be awarded to those who secured the highest percentage of votes in their respective constituencies compared to other unsuccessful female candidates.
If a female candidate campaigns for a general seat and loses by a narrow margin, she has still demonstrated significant public trust. By awarding her a reserved seat based on that performance, her place in parliament is validated by the votes she personally earned.
This creates a meritocracy: The reserved seats would no longer go to the ‘most loyal,’ but to the ‘most popular.’ And it does not involve a single additional taka.
This model also aligns with a reform idea proposed in an article last year: Allocating reserved seats based on women’s votes received by each party, since female and male ballots are cast in separate boxes and are already tabulated by the Election Commission.
Either mechanism achieves the same essential goal of grounding the reserved seat in some form of public preference rather than party discretion.
A data-driven necessity
The numbers suggest that we are just spinning our wheels. While this country has had female prime ministers for decades, the percentage of women in the 300 general seats remains stubbornly low, hovering around 4 to 7%.
The 50 reserved seats may provide a numerical win but it’s rather like a political wash. The data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) confirms that Bangladesh’s total female parliamentary representation, including reserved seats, stood at approximately 20%, a figure that masks the underlying structural weakness.
The IPU data also shows that countries with well-designed, legislated candidate quotas significantly outperform those relying solely on ‘reserved seat’ or ‘voluntary’ models.
In 2024, the proportion of women elected in lower chambers with quotas was 31.2%compared to just 16.8% in chambers without. More importantly, when women are directly elected, they are more likely to chair powerful parliamentary committees and influence national policies and budgets.
In the current Bangladeshi context, the 50 reserved seats are effectively ‘silent’ in the face of the party whip because their very existence in the chamber depends on the party’s pleasure.
Stirring the debate for reform
The selection of female MPs for the new parliament will likely follow the old pattern: Names decided in closed rooms, gazettes published, and oaths taken without a single vote being cast by a citizen for these individuals.
It is a system of ‘inclusion by invitation’ rather than ‘inclusion by right.’ After more than 50 years and multiple constitutional amendments, that distinction should feel more uncomfortable than it apparently does to those holding the levers of reform.
We, as individual citizens or collectively as a society, must be ‘aware’ and demand a change that honours the essence of the elected. A parliament is only as strong as its mandate.
By transitioning to a MPQ and a performance-based allocation of the reserved seats, we can ensure that the women in our parliament are independent voices powered by the voters who sent them there, not merely obligated to the party leadership for their presence in the house.
This reform would signal that women are no longer ‘outliers’ in the house of democracy, but its architects. It is time for Bangladesh to stop selecting its female representatives and start electing them.
Dr Sabbir Ahmad is an engineering and corporate leader with extensive global experience in digital connectivity, energy infrastructure, and sustainable development. He can be reached at [email protected].
