How Durreen Shahnaz Is Helping Rural Bangladeshi Women Run Their Own Business

From growing up with constrained life chances to working as the first Bangladeshi woman on Wall Street, to becoming a global leader in impact investing, Durreen Shahnaz takes the readers on a mesmerizing journey of innovation, compassion, and enterprise.

Durreen Shahnaz elaborates on her tours to the villages in Bangladesh where she helps women entrepreneurs learn to proudly sign their names and on visits to venture capitalists who walk past her to shake her male employees’ hands. She shares about her trip to a garment factory where women labour for low wages, and to a town in India where microfinance offers women enough capital to run grocery stores and tailor shops.

Here is an excerpt from Durreen Shahnaz's The Defiant Optimist

In my mother’s eyes, I never should have happened. On every birthday, dating back as far as I can recall, Ma would remind me that my gender had been a cruel mistake.

“You were supposed to be a boy!” she’d lament, wringing her hands, as if willing me to be replaced by a male heir. “You kicked around so much. I could feel you were going to be a boy!”

Each year on my birthday, my maternal grandfather Dadu would pull me aside. He dabbled in astrology as a hobby, and he had logged the exact time I was born: year, month, day, and time. “According to the astrological charts, the moment you were born comes just once in a century,” he’d say, pausing for effect, his eyebrows raised and his voice somber. “The moment is called chura moni: chura, the peak; moni, the jewel. When a boy child is born at the very time that you were born, the universe ensures that he will reach great heights.”

At this point in the story, which I heard many times before, I always hoped the ending would be different. I longed that Dadu’s reading of my fate this time would dictate that I, a girl child, would reach great heights too. I wanted assurance that this historic and once-in-a-century moment of fortunate birth, chura moni, could include me.

But the story always ended the same way. “But alas, the moment of chura moni was wasted on you,” Dadu would say sadly. “You were born a girl.”

To understand my mother’s and grandfather’s dismay, you need to understand my family. You need to understand the land of my birth, Bangladesh, and Bengali culture. I was born in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, the fourth daughter of a mother whose very happiness depended on the gender of her children. Three sisters had come before me. First, came Mahreen in the late 1950s. As the first child, she was my parents’ favourite. Then came Sharmeen in the early 1960s. She was bright, with a photographic memory but always sickly. A few years later came Tazneen: the most feminine, beautiful, and delicate of us all. And then came me. In the brief span of a decade, my mother gave birth to four girls.

It wasn’t unusual for a woman in our society to pin her hopes on producing sons. Many cultures still reward women who bear male offspring. Gender bias, specifically preference for sons, means that globally there are about 1.5 million missing female births every year due to sex-selective abortions. This phenomenon is most acute in Asia, especially in China and South Asia. Patriarchal values across many countries still tend to give men and boys incredible advantages and control over opportunities and resources, and factors like gender-based violence, unequal access to schooling, and child marriage harm girls and women.

So in the time and culture in which I grew up, a wife’s greatest responsibility—some might argue her only responsibility—was to produce male offspring. If she were lucky enough to give birth to a boy early in the marriage, she could move on to other things. But if she failed—if, like my mother, she produced four girls in a row—her value as a wife, as a person, remained in question.

Ma had a traditional arranged marriage to Papa when she was nineteen. Papa was twenty-six. Keeping to conservative Muslim tradition, my parents were in separate rooms during their wedding ceremony. They had not met before the ceremony, and this custom ensured that they would not meet during the ceremony either. Nevertheless, both my parents answered yes three times when asked by the imam if they would take the other person as a life partner. They were already husband and wife when they met each other, for the first time, on their wedding night.

They were a mismatch from the very beginning, but neither wanted to admit it. They had too much to lose. Their union was a practical one, designed to benefit the extended family. Papa was an academic on track for a promising career in government. He came from no money but had a well-known family title and smarts galore. Papa loved his books, doing crosswords, and playing chess. His mother, who arranged the marriage, saw in Ma a means to improve the family’s lot in life. That stemmed not only from the reputation and wealth of my mother’s family but also from her beauty.

Without question, Ma was beautiful. With lush dark hair, big brown eyes, flawless skin, and an enviable figure, my mother was like a Bengali Daisy Buchanan, the charming heroine in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Draped in a beautiful sari, Ma could hold court and cast a spell on all men and women who met her. Ma could also pick up languages effortlessly. She was fluent in Bengali, English, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Hindi. She could speak more dialects than I could count on my fingers and knew a smattering of French and Persian. She loved to socialize. At dinner parties, she was the flame around which guests gathered, charming people with her jokes, puns, and stories and fluidly moving from one language to another.

Ma longed for her life to include traveling, watching movies, and socializing. But because Papa’s family was not well off, and he was the eldest son, he sent most of the meagre salary he earned as a civil servant to his family to support his parents, eight sisters, and two brothers. My parents lived with my mother’s parents, who in turn supported them. And without any other sources of money in the family, this is the way their lives would always be.

So when I entered the world, I wasn’t just a source of disappointment, I was a constant reminder to my mother of her inadequacy. As a little girl, I had to wrap my mind around this heavy truth: I was the emblem of my mother’s failure, as a woman, to deliver.

Extracted with permission from 'The Defiant Optimist: Daring to Fight Global Inequality, Reinvent Finance, and Invest in Women' by Durreen Shahnaz; published by Penguin Random House India

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