Celebrating women at work

There is a particular kind of courage that does not announce itself. It does not arrive with fanfare or a formal declaration. It shows up quietly, in the decision to take the difficult posting when the comfortable one was available, to walk into a room as the only woman and speak first anyway, and to stay in an industry that has spent decades signalling, in many small ways, that you were not quite the intended audience.

Across Bangladesh today, in banks and insurance firms, in factories and startups, this courage is multiplying. The women at the centre of it are not waiting for permission.

Humaira Azam spent three decades in the banking sector, moving through roles that required both technical mastery and the subtler art of building institutional trust. When she became the first female Managing Director of Trust Bank Limited, she was breaking a 50-year pattern. Her career is a case study in what happens when talent meets persistence and refuses to be managed down.

A 2024 report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) found that women in Bangladesh’s banking sector have the highest career aspirations among their peers in emerging South Asian economies, with 89 percent aiming for senior roles. That is not a country short on hunger or drive. What it is short on is the structural infrastructure to honour that ambition, the sponsorship, the flexible pathways, and the absence of unspoken penalties for having a family.

The women who have made it to the top have done so despite those gaps, not because they were fixed. That distinction matters.

Farzanah Chowdhury understood something important about what leadership at the top actually allows you to do. As CEO of Green Delta Insurance, she led the only non-life insurer in Bangladesh to hold equity investment from the IFC. She used her position not merely to excel within the existing frame, but to redraw the frame entirely.

Tamara Hasan Abed at BRAC Enterprises oversees ten social enterprises -- including Aarong -- driven by the philosophy that commercial viability and social impact are not in tension but in service of each other.

This same commitment to evidence-based leadership is seen in Sylvana Quader Sinha, who built Praava Health into a brand the country trusts. For most of her tenure, approximately half of Praava’s management team were women. She has said plainly that female leaders attract and develop other female leaders.

There are also younger names like Tasfia Tasbin, who rose through AI startups to build solutions for small businesses from scratch. She framed the higher standard-- turning structural resistance into fuel rather than weight. It is something you see again and again in the women who are reshaping our corporate landscape.

None of this is to suggest the picture is complete, or the work finished. Women currently make up around 17 percent of Bangladesh’s banking sector workforce, well below the global average.

The barriers that remain are not invisible or mysterious. They are documented: limited flexibility, cultural expectations around relocation, and a promotion system that too often rewards potential in men while requiring proof in women. Acknowledging these gaps is the minimum required honesty.

Every woman who reaches a senior position in Bangladesh’s corporate world does something beyond building her own legacy. She makes the ceiling visible as a ceiling rather than as the natural top of the room. She recalibrates what a young woman entering the workforce in Dhaka believes is possible for herself. This is not a small thing. It compounds in ways that quarterly results cannot capture.

The writer is a banker and economic analyst