The Tamesis
February 16, 2026
Dhaka – As the dust settles on Bangladesh’s 13th national parliamentary elections, with the Election Commission (EC) announcing the election of 297 candidates to parliament, a major source of disappointment remains: the systemic lack of women’s political participation. Although a total of 85 women took part in the vote last Thursday, 66 of whom were party nominees and 19 as independent candidates, only seven were elected. Of the seven candidates, only one is an independent; the rest are from BNP Paribas. Furthermore, nearly a third of female candidates are relatives of influential men, according to the Election Commission’s pre-election statistics. Although 21 women were directly elected in the ninth parliament, the total number of female contestants in this election is the highest on record. These figures reflect the low participation of female politicians.
Those who seek to deny the persistence of systemic exclusion of women in Bangladeshi politics cite myriad factors. But when a political party openly declares that it will not allow women to hold leadership positions in post-uprising Bangladesh, we must acknowledge the urgency of the issue.
Women played a key role in overthrowing the Awami League regime in 2024, but there were hardly any female representatives at the National Charter consensus discussions in July. While male politicians were forcibly disappeared by Sheikh Hasina’s regime, women in their families have been leading the fight for justice for years. The 1972 Representation of the People Order requires political parties to reserve at least 33% of committee posts for women, including at the central level, but this requirement was also ignored by the major political parties in this election. Unsurprisingly, the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission’s recommendation to increase the number of directly elected reserved seats for women to 100 was not accepted by the political parties. At the same time, politicians’ promises and views on women’s empowerment sound more like rote remarks than driven by a genuine desire to improve persistent imbalances.
We hope that the new parliament will actively promote women’s political participation within the existing legal framework, including ensuring that women participate in local government elections in large numbers. It goes without saying that this is an expectation for all MPs, not just female representatives. When women are deliberately excluded from parliament, women’s issues fall further down the government’s list of priorities. When the participation of half the population is treated as optional, this is a dire threat to the practice of democracy itself.
