Human Rights of Women Domestic Workers in Dhaka City: Gender, Informality, and Urban Inequality

Women domestic workers in Dhaka occupy a highly vulnerable position at the intersection of gendered labor relations, employment informality, and urban inequality. This study examines the current level of human-rights vulnerability among women domestic workers and assesses whether gender inequality, informality and urban inequality are associated with the severity of rights violations. The study uses a quantitative cross-sectional design and distinguishes the analytic unit from supplementary stakeholder respondents. The dataset contains 100 respondents: 80 domestic workers and 20 key informants. The main inferential analysis is restricted to the 80 domestic workers because the research question concerns their lived working conditions. Five-item indices are constructed for gender inequality, informality, urban inequality, and human-rights outcomes. Stata 17 is used for descriptive statistics, reliability screening, Spearman correlations, multicollinearity diagnostics, ordinary least-squares regression with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors. Among domestic workers, the mean human-rights outcome score is 4.55 on a five-point scale, indicating a high level of reported rights vulnerability. In the controlled robust model, gender inequality is positively associated with the outcome (b = 0.462, p < .001), urban inequality is also positively associated (b = 0.424, p = .002), while informality is not statistically significant (b = 0.031, p = .609). The model explains 65.6% of the variance. These results suggest that gendered disadvantage and urban inequality are particularly important correlates of rights vulnerability, while the independent contribution of informality is less clear after controls are introduced.