In 2018, BIGD and BRAC conducted a nationwide youth survey, where young people across the country were interviewed about different dimensions of their lives. One of the dimensions was freedom of choice.
Freedom of choice is a basic human right. It is closely related to the sense of agency, which “refers to the subjective experience of controlling one’s action, and, through them, external events.”1 So, the lack of freedom of choice may be detrimental to individual agency. Research has found that when people are not given a choice, they may lose their agency, not only in essence but also in action.
That’s why we were interested in the perceived freedom of choice of the youth. We asked them to rate their freedom of choice in some critical areas as very low/low/high/very high. Overall, 70-80% of youth reported enjoying a high and very high level of freedom in case of selecting an educational institute, occupation, and friends. Fewer youth enjoy high or very high levels of freedom in terms of physical movement and spending money. The lowest level of freedom is reported on selecting a spouse. These findings are not unexpected.
But we also found large differences in the level of freedom enjoyed by the female and male youth in all aspects of freedom. In the case of freedom to choose their occupation, this difference is 30% and in the case of spending money, it is more than 25%. We see the starkest difference in case of physical mobility. Percentage of women enjoying a high or very high level of freedom of physical mobility is less than half the freedom that male youth enjoy, 40% vs 83%.
We created an index of freedom of choice* by combining the responses on each type of freedom. The following figure shows the percentage of youth who scored high in the freedom of choice index by their education. We see two things. First, young women’s perceived freedom of choice is strongly correlated with their level of education—freedom of choice improves with education. Second, in each cohort, the difference between male and female youth is still very high though the difference seems to somewhat narrow with higher education.
Overall, only 10% of male youth had low freedom of choice index whereas the rate is 45% for female youth.
*This variable has been constructed by summing up the variables indicating freedom of the youth. For example, educational institution selection, friend selection, freedom of movement, spending money, spouse selection, and occupation selection. If the value is 5 and 6, it indicates “Higher freedom.” Accordingly, if it is 0, 1, and 2 then “Low /No freedom”
We also find that rural young women reported having lower freedom of choice in every aspect compared to their urban counterpart. Only a third of the rural young women mentioned enjoying the freedom of physical movement, spending money, and spouse selection. These rates are much higher for urban young women.
We tried to identify whether freedom of choice varies with the socio-economic background across three aspects—freedom of movement, freedom to spend money, and freedom to select an occupation. We find that freedom of choice is quite consistent and high for young men across socio-economic classes. But women from lower socio-economic classes enjoy the least amount of freedom in all three aspects. With improving socio-economic status, more female youth reported enjoying these rights. But even among the richest young women, perceived freedom of choice is lower than that of young men from any socio-economic class. Again, we can see the starkest difference in physical movement.
All these findings indicate to the sticky nature of gender norms.
We do see, though, that young women who are engaged in economic activities are more likely to feel freer than those who are not, particularly in physical movement, spending money, and friends and occupation selection.
But, in our survey, we also found that the participation of young women in economic activities is very low compared to men. Forty-five per cent of the women are neither studying not earning. The rate is just 5% among young men. The vast majority of young women not pursuing higher studies are getting married and dropping out of the labour market. Economic activity among young women with higher education drastically improves, albeit much lower than the rates among young men with any level of education. But only 4% of young women study beyond higher-secondary, half the rate of male youth. Female youth are also much less confident about their English language and computer skills, the two most important competencies demanded by modern-day jobs. So, it is not just freedom of choice, young women in Bangladesh are falling far behind in most important aspects of life, particularly those related to their participation in the economy.
This is precisely why the lack of physical mobility for young women is of grave concern. Being able to move freely is a precondition for women to access education, training, social network, and employment. It is the way of achieving economic empowerment, a stepping stone for young women to gain social empowerment, including freedom of choice. And mobility is exactly where young women in Bangladesh are struggling the most.
Nusrat Jahan is the Head of Communications and Knowledge Management at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, BRAC University.
1Emilie A. Caspar et al., “Coercion Changes the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain,” Current Biology 26, no. 5 (March 7, 2016): 585–92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.067.
