Increase Participation of Female Production Workers in Export-Oriented Apparel Manufacturing and Related Industries

TABLE 5.1 Policy Recommendations to Increase FLFP and Women’s Transition from Jobs to Careers in Seven Middle-Income Countries (continued)

Policy recommendation Implementation considerations Countriesa increase access to education to promote female participation in careers increase upper-secondary enrollment and entry points to the industry Bangladesh, Cambodia, pakistan

Reduce information gaps on available career paths All

Break glass ceilings Reform legal barriers that reduce women’s access to and permanence in employment opportunities Bangladesh; Egypt, Arab Rep.; pakistan; Sri Lanka

promote inclusive workplace practices Engage foreign support and involvement All

All

Source: world Bank. Note: FLFp = female labor force participation. a. policies can be addressed by all seven countries studied in this report; however, some are more relevant to specific countries based on our results.

The overall message is that these countries should use the apparel industry as a launching platform to overcome the fixed costs of introducing more women into the labor market. But for this strategy to work, they must implement complementary policies that tackle the barriers that hinder women in their pursuit of long-term labor force participation and better-paid occupations.

Increase Participation of Female Production Workers in Export-Oriented Apparel Manufacturing and Related Industries

Among manufacturing industries, apparel provides one of the few opportunities for females with lower-secondary education or less to enter the workforce. The women are hired to work on the production line (as sewing machine operators and other assemblyrelated positions), an occupation that covers 70–80 percent of all apparel workers. Their skills are considered low in industry, but evidence from Southeast Asia and some Latin American countries suggests that acquiring the baseline skills for assembly-line manufacturing helps workers to move from apparel to electronics, medical devices, and automotive production when the time to upgrade between industries arrives in the country (Bamber and Frederick 2018; Bamber et al. 2019).

What is worrisome is that even though apparel has long been a female-intensive industry, our report shows that in many LMICs, women are underrepresented, meaning that the female share of apparel employment is below the world average (48 percent in 2015). This applies to most of our case countries. In Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, the female share of total apparel employment is equal to or below 50 percent. These countries still have room to expand apparel employment for female production workers.

IMPLEMENT PROGRAMS TO ATTRACT AND RETAIN MORE FEMALE WORKERS

To boost the share of women in export-oriented apparel and other female-intensive manufacturing industries (such as food or textile manufacturing), policy makers must step up efforts to attract and retain more female workers, as Jordan has done. Since 2010, the Jordanian government has supported the creation of satellite units to encourage employment of locals (ILO and IFC 2018a). The satellite factory program aims to increase Jordanian labor force participation in apparel by building factories and providing resources for training in rural areas. The objective is to provide training and employment opportunities for the unemployed—especially women in governorates with high rates of unemployment and poverty—and attract investments to remote areas and poor communities. Importantly, whereas men dominate supervisor positions in migrant-operated factories in qualified industrial zones, satellite factories are predominately supervised by women (ILO and IFC 2018b).

Steps can also be taken to ease mobility and safety concerns. For example, in Pakistan, the distance females must travel to work is a challenge for increasing female employment in apparel factories (Frederick and Daly 2019). In Egypt, women face mobility constraints, particularly in more conservative areas, stemming from norms about how far women can travel without a chaperone and fear of harassment (Kabeer 2013). One promising measure for reducing harassment is to reserve spaces for women on public transportation, as evidence in Mexico suggests (Aguilar, Gutiérrez, and Soto 2019). Another is providing alternative means of transportation (such as bicycles)— a policy intervention in India that increased girls’ enrollment in secondary schools (Muralidharan and Prakash 2017).

Countries with comparatively high education levels, such as Egypt or Turkey, might face a different set of challenges to increasing the share of female manufacturing workers. One is that workers will probably be unwilling to accept the low wages offered to production workers in apparel and related industries. However, apparel can also provide some room to expand production and employment opportunities in rural areas, although doing so would create challenges to exporting related to higher lead times and intricate chain logistics. These challenges would have to be weighed. This rural strategy would be more feasible to implement in countries where distances are