The hidden tax women pay in a patriarchal society

We are so habituated to seeing our mothers eating last, always offering us the best piece, and being left with only what remains or nothing at all. We grow up, get busy with life, and rarely notice whether our mothers ever got to have a good piece. 

We glorify our mothers' sacrifices but seldom ask about their dreams, let alone support them. Motherhood becomes her sole identity, the only role through which her existence is validated. This is where patriarchy begins, not in laws or policies, but inside our homes, practiced daily and often without realisation. 

What is learned at home does not stay there. When sacrifice becomes normal for women, deprivation becomes invisible in public policy. 

The state inherits this logic, builds on it, and governs accordingly. The price is paid by women not only through mental distress but also through greater personal expenditure.

Every woman in Bangladesh learns this arithmetic early: which road is safer, what time is too late to return, and which clothing invites scrutiny. 

None of this appears in budgets, policy speeches, or development reports, yet women calculate it daily. This calculation is not intuition; it is unpaid labour produced by fear and structured social inequality. 

Patriarchy in Bangladesh does not operate only through culture or family. It is embedded in governance. When the state fails to guarantee safety, mobility, and dignity, that failure does not vanish; it is quietly transferred to women. 

This transfer becomes the hidden tax women pay for living in a patriarchal society. Health is one visible consequence of this transfer. Nearly half of Bangladeshi women of reproductive age are anemic, often dismissed as a biological issue but actually reflecting structural deprivation, women eating last, least, and least nutritiously. 

Early marriage and repeated childbirth, often decided by families rather than women themselves, further compound long-term physical risk.

What begins as a normalised sacrifice at home eventually materialises as public health outcomes that remain politically under-addressed. 

But patriarchy's cost is not limited to bodies. It is also economic and political. Women routinely pay to stay safe. Calling a CNG or Uber is far more expensive than hopping on a bus and getting harassed by men; when calculating income and expenditure, harassment starts to appear as the only viable option because patriarchy costs you more and pays you less. 

Secure housing costs more. Better-paying jobs that require night travel are declined because commuting after dark is unsafe. These are not lifestyle choices; they are penalties imposed by an unsafe public sphere that women must absorb individually.

At the same time, women earn less, are clustered in informal sectors, and face workplace harassment that pushes many out of the workforce altogether. When women exit employment, the narrative conveniently blames "family responsibilities," not unsafe workplaces, weak labour protections, or a lack of childcare infrastructure. 

This narrative benefits neither women nor the economy, but it successfully keeps accountability off the state's ledger. Mobility itself remains deeply politicised: a man's presence in public space is assumed; a woman's must be justified.

As a result, surveillance replaces protection. Moral advice replaces policy reform. When harassment occurs, institutions rarely respond decisively. Instead, attention shifts to the woman – her clothing, her timing, her choices. 

Violence becomes individualised, while governance failure remains unnamed and unfunded. This is why promises like "pink toilets" deserve serious scrutiny. 

When political actors propose gender-segregated toilets as solutions to women's insecurity, the question is not whether toilets are necessary. They are, but why has women's safety been reduced to an infrastructure of separation rather than systems of accountability and protection? 

In a country that celebrates its rise to middle-income status and fast-paced development, women are still imagined primarily as bodies that need containment rather than citizens entitled to safe public spaces. 

Pink toilets do not address unsafe streets, weak policing, harassment in transport, or the absence of legal consequences for violence. They reveal a deeper policy failure: women are acknowledged only at the margins, only as an afterthought, only in ways that keep them contained rather than mobile.

Healthcare systems mirror this same logic. Women's pain is minimised, reproductive suffering normalised, and mental distress dismissed as weakness. 

Even safety becomes conditional. 

Women are told they will be protected if they behave correctly: dress modestly, return early, stay silent. Protection becomes transactional; rights become rewards. 

This arrangement is not accidental; it is efficient for a system that makes women absorb its failures. 

Why invest in public safety when women can restrict themselves? Why broaden labour protections when unpaid care fills economic gaps? Why enforce laws when morality can do the policing?  Patriarchy, then, is not merely a cultural mindset; it is an economic and political strategy – one that externalises its costs onto women while preserving institutional comfort.

On Women's Day, empowerment cannot mean teaching women to manage these risks more carefully. It must mean asking why, after decades of development claims and growth statistics, women still appear in policy as exceptions rather than central subjects, why their labour is only now being counted, not valued. 

A state that relies on women's unpaid labour, unpaid fear, and unpaid endurance is not empowering them; rather, it is governing at their expense. Progress will not be measured by how resilient women become, but by how little resilience is demanded of them.

Sketch: TBS

Aria Ashraf Anusakha is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Entrepreneurship Development, BRAC University. She can be reached at onusakha@gmail.com.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.