Who Gets to Lead the Factory Floor?
Bangladesh’s garment industry depends heavily on women, yet the people making clothes and the people managing production have historically not had equal access to power. Better Work’s Gender Equality and Returns (GEAR) program offers an interesting example of how that imbalance can change.
An assessment of the program found that more than two-thirds of women who completed GEAR training were promoted to supervisory positions, while their salaries increased by roughly 40%. The share of female supervisors in participating factories rose from 10% to 18%, and production lines led by GEAR-trained supervisors were 2.5 to 4.3 percentage points more efficient than comparable lines.
These results matter because they challenge a familiar argument: that improving gender equality is somehow separate from business performance. Here, greater opportunity for women was associated with both higher wages and stronger productivity.
But the deeper issue is representation. Women cannot be described as essential to the garment industry while remaining excluded from decisions about how factories operate. Empowerment should mean more than giving workers jobs; it should include access to authority, mobility, and leadership.
This is a lesson I keep returning to through Megaphone: meaningful advocacy should not only ask whether marginalized groups are included. It should ask whether they have the power to shape the spaces they are included in.
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