Woman behind the handlebars: Finding a place on Dhaka’s roads

I was standing by the road, waiting for a rickshaw to take me to the office, when one pulled up. Behind the handlebars was a woman. Surprised but needing a ride, I quickly agreed on a fare and climbed into the seat.

As we made our way through the morning traffic, curiosity got the better of me.

“How long have you been driving a rickshaw?” I asked.

Ranu Begum (not her real name, she does not want be named) kept her eyes on the road and answered plainly, “Two years.” She hesitated for a moment, looked back at me, and added softly, “Ma’am, I used to do a job like you.”

That simple sentence stayed with me. Above the roar of Dhaka’s streets, it was a reminder of how quickly a person’s livelihood can change and how thin the line can be between a regular job and informal work done simply to get by.

Before taking to the roads, Ranu worked in a beauty salon, an indoor service job that fit comfortably within societal expectations of female labour. But when mass protests and political turmoil brought normal business to a standstill in July 2024, the salon closed.

For Ranu, the loss of the job meant the loss of her income.

A divorced mother, she had been supporting her household on her own for years. She had three children to provide for: an elder daughter who is married, an 18-year-old son, and a younger daughter in Class Seven whose education depends entirely on her income.

I asked Ranu whether her son-in-law and his family knew that she drove a rickshaw, and whether they had any objections. “They don’t know,” she replied.

It was a brief answer, but it revealed another layer of the choices she had to make, not just in finding work, but in deciding what parts of that working life she could openly share with her family. In many ways, her struggle was not only about earning a living, but also about managing what that survival would look like in the eyes of those closest to her.

For Ranu, there was no time to wait for the job market to recover.

She used her savings to buy a battery-powered autorickshaw and took to the streets.

Now, when she drives through Dhaka, she is hard to miss.

Male rickshaw pullers lean over their handlebars to track her movement. Passengers press against bus windows to get a clearer view. Pedestrians stop mid-stride. To the men occupying the capital’s roads, Ranu is an anomaly.

When asked, Ranu shrugs it off, insisting she has never faced direct verbal or physical harassment on the road. But sitting beside her, it is difficult not to notice the stares, from fellow drivers, commuters and shopkeepers. They look at her as though she does not quite belong there.

In Bangladesh, public hostility does not always manifest as open abuse; often, it operates as an intense, unyielding public gaze designed to make women feel out of place.

Ranu’s transition from a salon worker to a commercial driver highlights a systemic issue within Bangladesh’s labour market: why are women so rarely seen driving, pulling rickshaws, or running street stalls, even as female workforce participation has grown elsewhere?

The answer lies in how society categorises “permissible” labour for working-class women.

Women from lower-income households who work are often concentrated in jobs that resemble traditional domestic roles: household help, hospital attendants, cooks, or garment workers. Even when women do physically demanding work, such as construction, it is often carried out in designated spaces away from the main public eye.

These jobs are more readily accepted because they do not challenge traditional ideas about where women belong. Cooking, cleaning and caregiving keep women largely within private or controlled spaces.

Driving a rickshaw is different.

It means being visible. It means dealing directly with passengers, negotiating fares and moving through spaces dominated by men. It requires a woman to occupy public space not as someone passing through, but as someone working there.

When Ranu took the handlebars, she crossed an unwritten cultural boundary.

The stares she receives every day are, in some ways, a reflection of that boundary being tested.

Ranu didn’t take up the handlebars of an autorickshaw to make a political statement; she did it out of sheer necessity to pay rent and keep her youngest daughter in school. Her story proves that when women are able to access capital, even through personal savings, they can break out of prescribed roles.

Ranu has claimed a place on Dhaka’s roads. What remains is for the rest of us to stop treating her presence there as something extraordinary.

A woman driving a rickshaw should not have to be a spectacle.

She should simply be a woman going to work.