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

Gender dimensions of labour migration in Dhaka city’s formal manufacturing sector
labourer in urban areas is Tk 36 per day, which is higher by Tk 11
than a rural woman’s daily wage (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics,
1995). Existing micro studies indicate that female workers in the rural
and informal sectors earn between a third and half of male wages.
The situation in the urban formal sector appears to be much better,
with the ratio of female to male wages ranging between 72 per cent
and 97 per cent, depending on skills level (World Bank, 1996).
Conversely, had these women migrated and been engaged as
domestic servants, they would have earned only Tk 690 (ADB, 1996)
per month, which is half of their present average wage (Tk 1,389).
Clearly, migration and the absorption in garment factories opened
up better earning avenues for younger women from landless
households with low level of education, compared to rural wage
labourers or those migrants who worked as housemaids.
4. Savings and remittances
Both the proportion of workers who save and the proportion of
income saved is greater for female than for male workers. Whereas
women workers in the garment industry save on average 8 per cent
of their income, the figure for male workers is 6 per cent (Table 12).
The respective figures for other manufacturing industries are 14 per
cent for women and 10 per cent for men. Male and female migrant
workers in the garment factories save on average six to eight times
more of their income than non-migrants. Similarly, in other
manufacturing industries, a migrant worker saves a proportionately
greater amount than a non-migrant worker.
Propensity to save appears to increase with age. Thus workers
belonging to the 30-39 year age group save nearly 20 per cent of their
urban income, as opposed to nearly 3 per cent of their youngest
counterparts (10-19 years) in garment factories. This holds equally
for both male and female workers (Table 13). It should be noted that
the monetary wage of garment factory workers also appears to
increase with age, though this is not the case in the other
manufacturing industries.
Nearly two fifths of migrant workers are able to send remittances
to their families of origin. An analysis of remittances shows that the
average size of the remittances as a proportion of monthly income is
higher for garment factory workers than for workers in other
manufacturing industries. On average, migrant male and female
garment factory workers send 39 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively,
of their income per month (Table 13). The corresponding figures for
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