Gender, environment and migration in Bangladesh

Abstract

This article addresses how gender norms impact the process of migration, and what this means for the use of migration as an adaptation strategy to cope with environmental stressors. Data was collected through qualitative fieldwork, taking the form of semi-structured and open-ended interviews and focus group discussions from a Dhaka slum and three villages in Southern Bangladesh's Bhola district. Our data revealed that women migrate when environmental stress threatens livelihoods and leave male household members unable to earn enough income for their families. Employing an analytical framework that focuses on the perceptions of individuals, this article shows how gender norms create social costs for women who migrate. Women thus have ambivalent feelings about migration. On the one hand, they do not wish to migrate, taking on a double work load, forsaking their purdah, and facing the stigma that follows. On the other hand, women see migration as a means to help their families, and live a better life. While social costs negatively affect the utilization and efficiency of female migration as an adaptation strategy to environmental stressors, it becomes clear that female migration is imperative to sustain livelihoods within the Bhola community.

The politics of gendered space: Social norms and purdah affecting female informal work in Dhaka, Bangladesh

“…It provides them with bargaining power to resist existing social and cultural norms. Feldman (2010) and Evertsen and van der Geest (2020) argue that female garment workers in Bangladesh have been able to successfully break social norms of not working outside home by wearing modest clothes and establishing fictive kin networks with male co‐workers to bargain with the Islamic rules of not having any contact with na‐mahram . Following Feldman (2010), in this article we use the term resistance to refer to this kind of bargaining power of women in accessing public and parochial realms.…”

Gendered translocal connectedness: Rural–urban migration, remittances, and social resilience in Thailand

“…Although academic and policy debates on remittances and their impact have for a long time rather neglected the gender dimension, for example, by presupposing remittance senders to be male migrants and receivers to be women (Gioli, Khan, Bisht, & Scheffran, 2014; Kunz, 2018), the interdependence of gender relations and remittance sending and usage has more recently gained traction in migration–development and migration–adaptation debates (Bettini & Gioli, 2015; Evertsen & Geest, 2019; King, Mata‐Codesal, & Vullnetari, 2013; Nyberg‐Sørensen, 2005; Petrozziello, 2011). Relevant research strands that have explored gender–remittance links include research on rural livelihoods (e.g., Thieme & Siegmann, 2010; Tiwari & Joshi, 2016) and rural–urban interaction (Le Mare, Promphaking, & Rigg, 2015; Tacoli & Mabala, 2010), transnationalism (e.g., Abrego, 2009; Hammond, 2011; King et al, 2013), gender studies (e.g., Resurreccion, 2005), and development studies (e.g., Naerssen, 2015).…”

Looking for Women in the Field: Epistemic Ignorance and the Process of Othering

“…When a woman moves for work, the patriarchal bargain breaks down. In my previous research, women justified this by pointing to the fact that the men in their families were unable to provide for them (Evertsen and van der Geest, 2020). In other words, according to these women, it was the men, not the women, who were the first to break the bargain.…”

“…When a woman takes up waged work outside the home, it indicates that her guardian has failed in providing for her in one or both of these ways, signalling that he has failed to fulfil his responsibilities as a man. Men's disapproval of women's participation in waged work is often due to this stigma, rather than a lack of belief that women can contribute to their family's well-being (Evertsen and van der Geest, 2020). This division of labour, where women's honour is exchanged for men's provision and protection, has been termed 'the patriarchal bargain' (Kandiyoti, 1988), and captures the dynamics of purdah in Bangladesh (Hossain, 2017, pp.…”