When a youth-led uprising in Bangladesh toppled the regime of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, women were at the forefront of the protests.But as Bangladesh heads to the polls today in what observers describe as its first free and fair election in decades, many of those women say they feel excluded from the very democratic transition they helped to create. “Women were only shown as a symbol of the uprising,” said Umama Fatema, one of dozens of former student leaders who believe that the interim government, installed after Hasina was ousted, includes few women in meaningful leadership roles. “After the uprising, the students who went into the government’s cabinet were all men, and women have been deliberately set aside,” she said. “The government was brought down, essentially, with the large participation of women,” said Safad Saaz, member of the Forum for Women’s Political Rights, a recently formed organisation aiming to improve women’s political participation. “We would not be here now having these elections, if it wasn’t for those young women.”But since then, women have been largely excluded from the political decision-making process, she said, with rising levels of gender-based harassment and a resurgence of hardline religious groups that seek to limit women’s roles in public life. In these elections, women make up fewer than 4% of candidates. Several major parties, including the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami – expected to secure a significant share of the vote – have nominated no female candidates at all.Representative image of women voters at a booth in Dhaka today. Photo: Devirupa Mitra/The Wire.On Sunday night, women in Dhaka took to the streets to protest growing gender-based discrimination and exclusion from the political arena.For more than three decades, politics in Bangladesh was defined by a power struggle between two women: Sheikh Hasina, and her opponent and three-time prime minister Khaleda Zia, who died in December.But beyond its leaders, Bangladesh has long struggled with low female political representation. A goal to increase representation to 33% has been pushed back to 2030 and remains far off target. After Hasina fled – she is said to be in hiding in India – an interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus was set up. Many were initially hopeful that the NGO leader, who has campaigned for human rights for decades, would bring about gender equality reforms.“There was this aspiration for a sort of Bangladesh 2.0,” said Saaz, where women “would be able to take part much more in a lot of different areas.”Instead, activists report rising online and offline harassment of women, particularly those running for office. Human rights groups have warned that attacks on women, girls, and religious minorities are on the rise across the country.“When the candidate is a female [she] faces at least one degree higher challenge or harassment or bullying” than her male counterparts, said Nabila Tasnid, a candidate for the National Citizen Party (NCP), the party formed by student leaders after the uprising.A candidate from the Bangladesh Socialist party, Shima Datta, said that safety concerns have limited her mobility on the campaign trail.“The male candidates are campaigning up until late night, but I need to come home by 10pm,” said the 52-year-old Dhaka 7 candidate. Shima Datta.Women in politics also face more judgement than men, said student leader Fatema. “For a boy, it’s a political judgment, but for a girl, it’s a judgment of how she looks, how she wears a dress, how her teeth are, how her nose is, how she talks,” she said. At the same time, Islamist and conservative views have gained traction, with some women reporting harassment for not covering their hair and calls for restrictions on women’s participation in public life, including activities such as women’s football matches.In an interview with Al Jazeera, Shafiqur Rahman, leader of the Islamist-leaning party Jamaat-e-Islami, caused outrage by declaring that it was “not possible” for a woman to lead the party in the future.NCP’s alliance with the party left many of its women candidates feeling betrayed, leading some to resign and run instead as independent candidates. “That was a difficult time,” said Tasnid, who is one of just two women NCP candidates left contesting the election. “I had to think a lot to understand the thought process behind this decision.” In the end, she made peace with the decision as a strategic alliance which does not affect NCP’s core ideology, she said. The interim government’s failure to denounce gender-based discrimination “helped unleash a wave of misogyny and the use of religion to attack women,” said Saaz.Rights-based groups have accused the interim administration of sidelining recommendations put forward by the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission. The July Declaration, a political manifesto to mark one year since the uprising, was also drafted without any women representation, said Saaz.“When that document doesn’t have any women as part of the process … that kind of sets the stage for how you’re viewing women,” she said.The lack of women representation has led to many issues prioritised by women being neglected, said Saaz. “So many things that women actually need and want are never raised within Parliament at the national level,” she said.Of 350 seats, 300 are directly contested, with another 50 reserved for women.But reserved seats do not meaningfully increase women’s political representation, Safad said. Because the women are nominated by party leaders to take up the seat, they are then “beholden to the top management who nominate them,” she said.Women should be “elected, not selected,” agreed Datta. Woman candidates who are directly elected are better placed to represent the concerns of women in their constituencies, she said.“As a woman I can go door to door, enter the home and talk to [female constituents]. That is not possible for men,” said Datta.Catherine Davison is an independent journalist and photographer based in Delhi, writing on global health, development policy and finance, inequality.