For 10 years, Sharmin Nahar Lina was a familiar face on NTV, presenting the news to audiences across Bangladesh. But as she grew older and she gained some weight, she found herself increasingly uncomfortable with the channel's expectations of how a woman news presenter should look.
Lina left NTV in May 2025. For most of her decade at the channel, she said, she had “a great experience and faced no direct issues”.
That changed after August 5, 2024, when, according to her, the channel abruptly altered its working environment and dress code. NTV introduced a requirement for presenters to wear formal attire, she said, a rule that channels such as BanglaVision, Channel 24 and Jamuna did not impose.
“As a mature woman who had become slightly bulkier, sarees suited me much better and looked far more professional and flattering,” the 43-year-old said.
For Lina, the change was about more than clothing. She believes dress-code requirements can become a way of pushing women out of television when they no longer fit the industry's preferred image.
“Channels enforce dress code changes on female anchors after a certain age, claiming their ‘glamour’ has faded, creating restrictive policies to force them to quit,” she said.
Daily Waadaa spoke to at least five female and two male news presenters, including Lina, about their experiences in the television industry.
Their accounts point to a wider concern among women news presenters in Bangladesh: growing older can mean losing the professional opportunities they have spent years building. As they age, their body shape, complexion and wardrobe can begin to matter more to television executives than their voice, language, experience and command of the news.
Bangladesh has approximately 800 active news presenters, around 650 of whom are registered members of the News Broadcasters Alliance of Bangladesh (NBA), according to its general secretary, Raisul Haque Chowdhury. Including digital multimedia outlets, the number approaches 1,000. Women account for more than 70% of the workforce.
“At NTV, for example, we have only five or six male presenters out of 25 to 30 anchors,” said Raisul, who is also a senior news presenter at the channel.
Yet a large female presence on television screens does not necessarily translate into equal treatment behind the scenes.
Lina's departure followed a dispute over a Facebook post concerning a former prime minister. She was taken off air for three months.
“I was so deeply upset by this unfair off-air suspension that I resigned out of self-respect,” she said.
For older women presenters, being pushed out does not always begin with dismissal. It can happen gradually, through fewer appearances, less desirable shifts and growing pressure over their appearance.
According to Habiba Rahman, an assistant professor in Dhaka University's Department of Television, Media and Photography, executives seeking to sideline women because of their age or weight may transfer them to early-morning shifts with smaller audiences, reduce their on-air appearances or subject them to body-shaming until they resign.
“State-run Bangladesh Television, by contrast, retained older female newsreaders for decades,” she added.
Lopa Hossain, who is nearing 40 and has worked as a presenter for 20 years, described a similar pattern. She worked at ATN Bangla from 2007 to 2017 and Bangla TV from 2022 to 2023.
“Channels rarely terminate senior anchors directly,” she said. “Instead, they may alter dress codes or reduce news shifts until they quit.”
Lopa began presenting while studying at Dhaka University and later ran a news presentation academy. Her experience also exposed her to the industry's expectations of appearance when she tried to help journalism-trained students enter television.
When she sent students for auditions, she said, station executives dismissed them because of how they looked.
“What kind of faces did you send? News won't run with faces like these; send fair, slim, handsome models,” she recalled them saying.
“It frustrates me deeply how the industry has degraded,” she said, “prioritising heavy makeup, fair skin and slim figures over presentation skills, language accuracy and journalistic competence.”
For Toa Afroz, 26, a part-time presenter at Star News, the problem is also reflected in how professional opportunities are distributed.
She acknowledged that some presenters try to cultivate relationships with producers and executive producers to secure more shifts, but said management was equally responsible for perpetuating the practice.
Appearance, she said, could become a basis for both unwanted attention and professional exclusion. If an anchor was considered attractive, executives might say, “She is very beautiful, call her so we can hang out and chat.”
If her appearance failed to meet their expectations, however, the response could be very different: “Her face isn't good on screen, give her fewer news slots.”
Appearance-related pressure is not confined to women. Male presenters also face criticism over their physical appearance, although the consequences can differ.
Mohammad Mizanur Rahman Khabir, 44, who worked as a presenter and journalist at Somoy TV and Ekhon TV between December 2010 and May 2024, said middle-tier producers had repeatedly tried to exclude him from outdoor broadcasts, claiming he was too fat.
Before a one-hour live assignment in Mongla and Netrokona, producers spent six days debating whether his build would look bad on camera, he said.
Management eventually assigned him because no one else could present a full hour live without an autocue or breakdowns. Senior executives continued to value him for his voice, delivery and command of the news, he added.
Raisul, who has been a senior news presenter at NTV for 14 years, said pressure over age and appearance was a global media issue. However, he argued that individual professionals also had a responsibility to maintain their fitness and presentation.
“In Bangladesh, many professionals neglect personal fitness and self-care after securing a position,” he said. “When they fail to maintain their physical presentation, their screen longevity naturally declines.”
He also pointed to changing audience expectations. Unlike in the era of one-way broadcasting, viewers can now comment instantly on presenters' delivery, style and appearance on Facebook and YouTube, requiring presenters to adapt to remain relevant.
At the same time, Raisul acknowledged that station executives often preferred slim, fair-skinned or young presenters “based entirely on arbitrary internal assumptions”.
“There is no empirical research paper or survey in Bangladesh proving that viewers reject older or heavier news anchors,” he said.
The pressure on women to remain youthful on screen is not confined to Bangladesh. International broadcasters have also faced scrutiny over how age and gender influence decisions about who gets to remain visible.
According to Information Ministry, Bangladesh has 59 television channels, 1,436 newspapers and 474 online news portals. Of the television channels, 39, including four state-owned ones, are on air.
Despite the size of the country's media industry, women's visibility on screen does not translate into equal representation across other areas of journalism.
A 2023 study by South Asia Center for Media in Development (SACMID), Inclusion: Gender Content Monitoring in Selected Media Outlets in Bangladesh, monitored more than 9,400 news items published between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2023.
At Jamuna TV and Bangla Vision, women presented 2,479 of 3,382 news items, accounting for 73.3% of the total, while men presented the rest. However, women made up only 9.77% of reporters, highlighting the gap between their presence in newsreading roles and their participation in news production.
The study captured this imbalance in its conclusion: “women are presenting in the media only for reading news, not for report producing”.
The experiences of women presenters in Bangladesh also echo concerns raised within the BBC.
In March 2025, four BBC presenters — Martine Croxall, Annita McVeigh, Karin Giannone and Kasia Madera — reached a last-minute settlement with the corporation over claims of age and sex discrimination in a recruitment process they described as “rigged”.
The dispute followed the BBC's 2022 decision to merge its domestic and global news channels. The corporation made no admission of liability, maintained that the process was “rigorous and fair”, and all four presenters remain at the BBC.
The debate continued in January 2026, when The Guardian reported on an independent review finding that older women were disappearing from BBC presenting roles while older men were seen as gaining “gravitas and wisdom”.
Among presenters over 50, the review counted 394 men and 237 women. In the over-70 age group, there were 57 men and just 11 women, out of a pool of almost 1,500 presenters.
For Habiba, however, the problem emerges even earlier in Bangladesh.
“While global outlets publish studies on the disappearance of women over 50 from screens, local Bangladeshi channels push women off air even earlier,” she said.
Habiba also criticised local broadcasters for imitating Western outlets such as the BBC and CNN without considering Bangladesh's working conditions. She cited the requirement for male presenters to wear heavy suits and ties despite the country's hot climate as an example of how imported conventions can take precedence over practical needs.
The pressure on presenters to maintain a particular appearance is rooted, Habiba believes, in the way the television industry developed in Bangladesh.
She traces the problem to the expansion of private television channels after the 1990s, against the backdrop of global neoliberal capitalism.
In visual media, she said, “an unwritten, imaginary assumption exists that physical appearance is the primary qualification”.
As a result, management often focuses on makeup, clothing and facial features rather than a presenter's ability to ask incisive questions, read accurately and communicate information effectively.
Privately owned channels, she argued, have largely failed to develop into stable, professional institutions over nearly three decades. Without job security or standardised codes of conduct, “problems like sexual harassment, sexism and workplace violence become severely pronounced”.
Aditi Sabur, an associate professor in Dhaka University's Department of Women and Gender Studies, identifies the “male gaze” as another underlying factor.
“Men with grey or white hair walk around with complete confidence and are praised as ‘handsome’ or ‘distinguished’,” she said. Women, however, are expected to maintain fair skin, unblemished faces and a youthful appearance.
The double standard means that while ageing can add to a man's perceived authority and experience, it can undermine a woman's prospects of remaining on screen.
Habiba said meaningful change would require media organisations to move away from business-driven biases and towards institutional professionalism, “treating presentation as a skill rather than a showcase for physical appearance”.
For Aditi, reform must begin with the people making hiring and promotion decisions. Media organisations remain overwhelmingly male-dominated, she said, and those in leadership positions often lack gender sensitivity.
“Women in Bangladeshi media are denied the opportunity to age gracefully on screen."
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