Promoting Women to Managerial Roles in the Bangladeshi Garment Sector

Rocco Macchiavello, Andreas Menzel, Atonu Rabbani and Christopher Woodruff

No 2026-04, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Women remain disadvantaged in promotion to managerial positions. We conduct a field experiment with 24 large garment factories in Bangladesh to test for inefficient representation of women among line supervisors. We identify the marginal female and male candidates for supervisory positions and randomly assign them to manage production lines. We document four findings: (1) In contrast to widespread negative beliefs about women’s ability as supervisors at baseline, female candidates selected by the factories had similar skills to males; (2) during the trial, females performed worse than males, which we show is related to negative bias against them; (3) after the trial, however, many female candidates were retained as supervisors and, conditional on that, performed similarly to males; and (4) after the end of our intervention, factories permanently increased the share of women among newly appointed supervisors. A conceptual framework of experimentation over discrimination rationalizes all these facts and cautions against the standard logic to test for discrimination: when there is uncertainty about the performance of the discriminated group, equal – or even worse – performance of the marginal candidates of that group is no longer sufficient to rule out inefficient discrimination.

Keywords: Gender Discrimination; Productivity; Export Manufacturing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J71 M51 M54 O14 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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