Women's Employment - United Nations Research Institute for Social ...

Gender dimensions of labour migration in Dhaka city’s formal manufacturing sector
disparity in income is found at supervisory/technical/managerial
level, which is consistent with Rahman’s (1993:103) findings on wages
in export processing zones. 8 At the managerial level, often the total
number of workers is included in the sample owing to the availability
of only a small number of women in this category. Hence it was not
always possible to draw gender-disaggregated samples by matching
age. As a result, the gender gap is higher in this group as demonstrated
by lower male-female earning ratios for both garment (0.73) and nongarment
(0.83) than either skilled (0.87 and 1.02 respectively) or
unskilled (0.82 and 1.02 respectively) workers levels (Table 8).
The above discussion suggests the importance of age in
determining income. However, it also reveals that a sample female
worker earns on average 10 to 25 per cent less than her male
counterpart even after controlling for age. Hence, there are other
socioeconomic factors that can help explain this gap. Both number of
years of schooling and experience from other factories are important
variables influencing income. On average, a male garment factory
worker had 3 years of schooling and about 1.5 years of experience as
opposed 2.6 and 1.2 years respectively for his female counterparts.
While the average education of male and female workers in the other
manufacturing industries is almost equal (3.8 and 3.6 years
respectively), men have on average 1.6 more years of experience than
female workers. It should be noted that given the extremely limited
opportunities for on-the-job training, workers often learn skills from
their fellow workers informally in the garment industry. Once they
learn machine operation they apply directly for positions as operators
or skilled production workers in another factory. 9 Consequently, the
turnover rate is very high, as revealed through interviews with the
employers of the garment factories and confirmed in other studies
(Chaudhury and Majumdar, 1993). Even at the managerial level,
where men and women have almost equal levels of education,
experience matters a lot, especially in other manufacturing industries
where the gender gap with regard to experience is widest (14.4 years
for men and 0.6 years for women). The opportunities for informal
training in management are not so readily available as is the case
with skilled operators.
Results of a multivariate regression analysis run by Zohir and
Majumdar (1996:51-52) on determinants of income of garment factory
workers show that education beyond primary level, skills and
experience are the most important factors affecting gender difference
in earnings. They also found that even after controlling for all relevant
variables, the income difference between male and female workers
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