ABSTRACT
Bangladesh’s 1972 Constitution entrenched the principle of formal equality, with leeway for positive discrimination in favour of women. This chapter maintains that, despite these commitments, a lack of gender sensitivity permeates the constitutional scheme. Rather than revisiting debates that have been extensively addressed in the existing literature on discrimination against women generally, this chapter seeks to assess women’s status in light of the constitutional promise for their equality in the public realm. In doing so, it evaluates women’s equal status within the spectrums of ‘we, the people’ and ‘the political’, through a scrutiny of the constitution-making process, the development of constitutional jurisprudence, and the representation of women in politics. The chapter argues that the under-representation of women in the political realm violates one of the meta-norms of the Constitution, namely, representative democracy.
