Following the July 2024 political transition, Bangladesh has witnessed both democratic momentum and rising social challenges. Several reports and print media indicate a post-August spike in gender-based violence, harassment in public spaces, and increased vulnerability for women, gender-diverse individuals, and religious minorities. Key reforms such as the Uniform Family Law and expanded women’s political representation continue to face resistance, highlighting persistent gaps in ensuring Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI). In this context, IID’s recent youth-led GESI workshop becomes especially timely, strengthening young changemakers to address these urgent issues at the community level.
Based on this backdrop, the Institute of Informatics and Development with the collaboration of Youth for Policy (YfP) held a Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) workshop in recent weeks to nurture the next generation youth from different districts of Bangladesh. The event brought together 60 young participants from across the country, the goal of which was to equip these youths with the knowledge and tools to apply a GESI lens in their own communities, aspiring community leaders and innovators. By learning to identify gender- and inclusion-related stereotypes, barriers and biases through interactive sessions, participants were better prepared to design initiatives that leave no one behind. According to the organizers, at least 20 of the attendees are already working on solutions to issues in their home communities, and this workshop was designed to bolster those efforts with a strong foundation in GESI principles.
Storytelling and Gender Lens Basics
The first session opened with an interactive storytelling activity through flying paper planes containing their own stories and experiences that set the tone for honest dialogue. Participants anonymously shared personal anecdotes about challenges or biases they had witnessed related to gender and social inclusion. Some spoke of girls in their villages being discouraged from pursuing higher education and forced for early marriage, male participants expressing their struggles of family and societal expectations and financial burden, one participant sharing their experiences of struggle due to their sexual identity, and other young people facing family and social pressures due to gender stereotypes, bias and social norms. By voicing these experiences in a safe space, the youth surfaced common threads of inequality and built empathy with one another. This storytelling exercise made clear why gender inequality and social exclusion matter on a personal–level and it energized the group to learn how to address such issues.
Following the icebreaker, a formal session on GESI fundamentals was conducted. The facilitator began by distinguishing gender from sex, explaining that gender roles are socially constructed and often rooted in long-standing stereotypes. Through real-life examples, the facilitator illustrated how these stereotypes — such as the belief that women are inherently “caring, sensitive, and nurturing,” while men are seen as “strong and capable leaders” — are shaped by cultural and historical narratives, including Greco-Roman symbolism associated with the god Mars and the goddess Venus. These gendered notions influence how individuals perceive others and reinforce inequality.
Exploring Identity and Privilege
The second session began with a quick energizer, refreshing participants for the activities that were based on understanding identity, empathy, and problem analysis. The session “Who Am I?” and the Power Flower activity encouraged participants to explore intersectionality, privilege, and unconscious bias, highlighting how different layers of social identity shape access and opportunity in education. In this activity, each participant filled out a diagram shaped like a flower, with petals representing different identity categories. On the inner part of each petal they wrote their identities that gave them privileges or power (for example: male, upper-class, Muslim, urban, etc.), and on the outer part, they highlighted the identities that pose barriers to them (e.g. female, other religions, lower-income groups, urban). Seeing the “flower” of identities laid out in this way was a powerful visual reckoning with privilege. It became clear that many participants belonged to the dominant group in some petals but not in others. This illustrates the concept of intersectionality – that people can be privileged in some respects and marginalized in others. The pair–discussion that followed was lively and eye-opening. Participants shared how, for instance, a wealthy woman may have economic privilege but still face gender discrimination, or how a male from a minority ethnic group might benefit from being male yet encounter prejudice due to ethnicity. By acknowledging these layers, the youth gained a deeper awareness of unconscious biases and how societal power dynamics favor certain identities over others. This empathetic understanding is key to GESI: one must recognize one’s own relative privilege and bias in order to effectively include and uplift others who are marginalized. At the end of the session, the facilitator emphasized that having privilege is not something to feel guilty about — rather, it comes with the responsibility to use that advantage to support those facing barriers, and to remain socially accountable for one’s actions.
Following this, an interactive Agree–Disagree Game was arranged to help participants surface and reflect on their unconscious biases. A series of provocative statements were read aloud, and participants physically positioned themselves along a spectrum of agreement or disagreement, followed by open discussions. Statements included: “Men and women are now equal in Bangladesh; so, feminism is no longer necessary”; “If a wife earns more than her husband, it creates problems in the household”, “Rural youth are smarter than urban youth; they just don’t have Wi-Fi”, “Women politicians get opportunities only because of quotas”, etc.
These statements sparked lively conversations where participants respectfully debated their views, examined where those beliefs came from, and became more aware of the social norms influencing them.
After the game, facilitators introduced the concept of social norms and their connection to unconscious bias by sharing examples. For instance, the facilitator noted that families often pressure young women by saying, “If you don’t study, we’ll marry you off,” whereas boys are told, “Study, or you’ll end up pulling a rickshaw.”. The group explored how deeply rooted cultural expectations shape perceptions of gender and power. Participants then engaged in deeper opinion-sharing to reflect on their own lived experiences. For example, one female participant shared how her university environment allowed her to enjoy bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, an experience she described as empowering. However, others noted that their families discouraged them from attending the same university due to its liberal environment, illustrating how differing social expectations and gender norms affect women’s choices, even within the same community. During the same day a “Design Thinking Workshop: Empathy Mapping & Solution Ideation” was also held, where they learned the five stages of design thinking—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test—and applied these to address community issues. Participants were encouraged to take GESI considerations especially during the empathizing phase through storytelling where most of themes were centered around lack of awareness on girls’ rights of education, family and social barriers and expectations for different genders, etc.
The GESI workshop empowered youth with the tools, perspective, and confidence to challenge inequality and foster inclusive change in their communities. By grounding policy thinking in lived experience and empathy, participants are now equipped to design and lead solutions that reflect the realities of those most often left behind. Their ongoing efforts signal a growing movement of young changemakers committed to building a more just and equitable Bangladesh.