A City Built Around Male Drivers
Dhaka’s roads have long been a male domain. The rickshaw pullers, the CNG auto-rickshaw drivers, the bus conductors shouting destinations from open doors, the motorcycle couriers weaving through gridlock on Mirpur Road: for most of the city’s modern history, the people navigating its streets professionally have been overwhelmingly men. Women have always been passengers, rarely drivers. That is beginning to change.
The shift is gradual, uneven, and often uncomfortable for the women at the centre of it. But it is real. Across Dhaka, a growing number of women are taking up positions behind handlebars and steering wheels, from ride-sharing motorcycles to auto-rickshaws, pushing into spaces where they were once invisible. Their presence on the road is not just a transport story. It is a window into how Bangladesh’s cities are renegotiating what public space looks like for women.
What the Roads Have Always Demanded
Dhaka is one of the most congested cities in the world. Traffic moves at an average speed that, on bad days, barely exceeds a brisk walk. The city’s transport ecosystem is layered and chaotic: rickshaws by the hundreds of thousands, buses running on informal routes, CNGs, leguna minivans, and now app-based ride services that have added motorcycles and cars to the mix. Navigating this as a driver requires physical confidence, local knowledge, and a thick skin for the constant negotiation of space that Dhaka’s roads demand.
For women, those demands come with an additional layer. Female drivers report being questioned, stared at, and sometimes harassed by male passengers or fellow drivers who treat their presence as an anomaly. The road, in a city where public space has historically been coded as male after dark and often during the day, does not always extend a neutral welcome.
The Women Who Showed Up Anyway
Despite this, women have been entering Dhaka’s transport workforce in increasing numbers over the past decade. Ride-hailing platforms that launched in Bangladesh in the mid-2010s created a new entry point. Services specifically designed to connect female passengers with female drivers emerged partly as a safety measure and partly as an economic opportunity, giving women a way to earn income while working within the social expectations many families still hold about mixed-gender interaction.
Beyond the app economy, women have taken up driving in other corners of the city’s transport network. Some have trained as professional drivers through NGO and government programmes aimed at expanding women’s economic participation. Others have come to it through necessity, supporting families after a husband’s illness or death, finding that a vehicle and a licence opened income possibilities that garment work or domestic employment could not match.
Their stories rarely make headlines. But they accumulate into something significant: a slow rewriting of who belongs on Dhaka’s roads.
The Broader Context of Women’s Mobility in Bangladesh
Bangladesh has made substantial progress on women’s participation in the formal economy. The garment industry, which employs roughly four million workers and is the backbone of the country’s export earnings, is majority female. Women’s enrolment in secondary and tertiary education has risen sharply over the past two decades. Female life expectancy now exceeds that of men. The country has been led by women prime ministers for most of the period since 1991.
Yet mobility in the literal sense, the ability to move freely through public space, has lagged behind these gains. Harassment on public transport remains a documented problem. Many women in Dhaka report modifying their routes, their timing, and their behaviour to manage safety risks that their male counterparts do not face. The women who choose to drive professionally are, in a quiet way, pushing back against those constraints by occupying the driver’s seat rather than the passenger’s.
What Needs to Change
Infrastructure and policy have a role to play. Dedicated training programmes, access to vehicle financing, and enforcement of anti-harassment rules on public transport would all make a difference. Some of this work is already underway through partnerships between the government, development organisations, and private sector operators. But the pace is slow relative to the scale of the need.
What is perhaps most striking about the women finding their place on Dhaka’s roads is how ordinary their motivations are. They want to earn a living, move through their city, and be taken seriously at their work. The fact that doing so still requires a particular kind of courage says something about how much road remains to be covered, in every sense of the phrase.