The paradox of women in power and the myth of soft leadership

For 15 and a half years, Bangladesh showcased Sheikh Hasina as the ultimate symbol of female empowerment; the woman who survived assassination, exile, and persistent threats to become the longest-serving leader in our history. But her shocking downfall and the extraordinary reality of her death sentence have forced us to confront a deeper truth about gender and power that we have long avoided. Women's leadership is not, and has never been, inherently soft, compassionate, or morally elevated. The comforting narrative that women will rule differently with tenderness or ethical clarity collapses when examined against the political histories of women who, like their male counterparts, have wielded the machinery of the state with force and sometimes with violence.

Hasina's rule was a stark reminder that women do not transcend systems simply by occupying them. Her government expanded digital surveillance, tightened police control over dissent, criminalised criticism through the Digital Security Act, 2018, and presided over a political culture where fear and patronage became governance tools. That this apparatus was commanded by a woman did not soften its impact. If anything, it highlighted something feminist scholars have long argued: institutions shape leaders far more than gender shapes institutional behaviour. In the recent volume Gender and Nation in South Asia: Feminist Positions, Scholarship and Directions, scholars remind us that South Asian nationalism often elevates women symbolically, as mothers, cultural guardians, and embodiments of the nation, while leaving the structural hierarchies around them untouched. Bangladesh followed that script. The patriarchal and increasingly authoritarian state beneath Hasina grew stronger, not weaker, during her tenure, although she was celebrated as the "Jononetri" (leader of the nation).

This is not a uniquely Bangladeshi contradiction. Margaret Thatcher governed Britain with an iron fist that crushed unions and deepened working-class precarity, disproportionately harming the very women her symbolic victory was supposed to uplift. Angela Merkel, though far more restrained, presided over a Germany that stabilised but did not transform gendered inequities in pay, care, and safety. Women leaders do not automatically alter the structures they inherit; they often adapt to them. The mythology that women ascend to power and soften it from within is one of the most persistent fantasies of liberal politics and one of the least supported by evidence.

The limits of symbolic empowerment

Bangladesh has developed its own version of the fantasy that women in power will automatically lift all women. Instead of building a political movement, we built an NGO-ised vision of empowerment, locating change in microfinance, garment factory floors, and donor-led "awareness" campaigns. For years, empowerment was something women received, never something they organised to claim. Millions of women entered the economy as microfinance clients and wage workers, but they did so as individuals—economically active but politically isolated. The result is that women became engines of export earnings, but not a constituency that could negotiate, demand, or transform.

This explains why, when horrific violence unfolds—such as the rape and murder of an adolescent girl by her elder sister's father-in-law earlier this year—Bangladeshi people protest without any major party machinery rallying behind them. No national platform exists to treat gender-based violence as political violence. After decades of celebrating women's labour force participation, we still do not have a women's movement capable of shifting the moral centre of politics. Instead, millions of women navigate systems that neither protect nor represent them.

Women at the top, women left behind

The paradox Bangladesh cannot ignore is this: we can produce powerful women, but too often, powerless women continue to fall through the cracks. Even now, as the country wrestles with Hasina's legacy, conservative voices like Jamaat-e-Islami are resurfacing proposals that subtly steer women back into the domestic sphere. For example, Jamaat's leader, Shafiqur Rahman, has promised to reduce women's official working hours from eight to five if his party comes to power. He frames this as a way to "honour" mothers, but critics see it as a deeply patriarchal message wrapped in dignity. The implication is clear: women are morally superior when they stay home or limit their public roles.

Meanwhile, Hasina's political journey shatters any notion of fragility that we might expect of women leaders. Her decades in power showed that women can wield state power with discipline, force, and even ruthlessness if need be. If her example teaches us anything, it's that leadership is not naturally soft and that strength should not be gendered. While the state was able to produce a woman prime minister who commanded the military, controlled parliament, and dominated national narratives for over a decade, it still failed to create avenues through which ordinary women could shape their own futures. Legal rights remain difficult to access. Single mothers remain deeply stigmatised. Divorced women are treated with suspicion. Mental health remains a luxury, not a right. Domestic helps, mostly women, live and labour without meaningful protections. This lack of transformation after years of female leadership feels deeply personal as a friend's domestic help, a single mother, took her own life recently. Her life, like so many others, folded quietly into the country's indifference after she had to give up the tiring battle for land rights and the custody of her child. Her invisibility stands in stark contrast to the spectacle of Hasina's downfall.

Beyond soft leadership

Hasina's era teaches a clear lesson. Women are not inherently gentle or morally superior. They are fully human, capable of the same range of leadership, ambition, brilliance, ruthlessness, and error as men. The problem lies not in women leading but in how we conceive power itself. The real danger is absolute power, unchecked by institutions, transparency, and civic accountability.

The lesson for Bangladesh is twofold. First, we must reject the narrative that women belong at home, fragile and protected, and that "honour" is only realised within domestic boundaries. Second, we must reject the fantasy that women entering the workplace or politics will magically purify broken systems. Leadership is not gendered; it is structural. What changes the experience of women in Bangladesh is not having a woman at the top, but creating systems in which women at all levels can claim voice, rights, safety, and dignity.

If we truly want a different future, we must build systems, not symbols. We must build collective power, not rely on singular women. We must build a politics where every woman, not just one at the top, has rights, a voice and autonomy. Only then can Bangladesh finally leave behind the myths of feminine virtue and masculine authority, and step into a politics grounded in equality, not fantasy.

Tasmiah T Rahman works at Innovision Consulting and is pursuing a joint PhD programme between SOAS University of London, UK, and BRAC University on the political economy of development.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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