Equal Inheritance Rights for Women in Bangladesh: Legal Reform, Cultural Resistance, and Pathways to Implementation

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_14How to use a DOI?

Keywords

women’s inheritance; Bangladesh; personal laws; constitutional equality; property rights

Abstract

Inheritance goes beyond legality; it is a foundation of women’s economic empowerment, equality, and security in Bangladesh. Although the Constitution promises equality and non-discrimination, women still face barriers in receiving inherited property. Under Muslim personal law, women are given fixed shares, but those shares are not equal to those of men. Under Hindu Dayabhaga law, daughters face even greater exclusion from family property. The Succession Act 1925 provides an equal framework for minority communities, yet in practice women cannot enjoy their rights because of family pressure, social customs, and problems in land administration. As a result, women continue to own only a small share of agricultural land in Bangladesh. This paper examines the legal and practical problems that affect women’s inheritance rights in Bangladesh. It uses a qualitative mixed-method approach based on secondary sources. The paper looks at the Constitution of Bangladesh, the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961, the Succession Act 1925, Hindu Dayabhaga principles, and Bangladesh’s obligations under CEDAW. It refers to reforms in India and Nepal for comparison. The paper shows that there is a gap between legal rights on paper and women’s ability to enjoy rights in real life. Family pressure, lack of legal awareness, corruption, delay in mutation and registration, and weak institutional support all contribute to this problem. The paper argues that stronger legal reform, better implementation, improved land administration, and wider legal awareness are necessary to protect women’s inheritance rights in a meaningful way.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ayesha Binte Zaman Raisa
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/30
TI  - Equal Inheritance Rights for Women in Bangladesh: Legal Reform, Cultural Resistance, and Pathways to Implementation
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Challenges and Trends in Arts and Social Sciences (ICCTASS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 166
EP  - 178
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_14
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_14
ID  - Raisa2026
ER  -