Promoting women to managerial roles in the Bangladeshi garment sector

Macchiavello, Rocco ORCID: 0009-0007-5465-3153, Menzel, Andreas, Rabbani, Atonu and Woodruff, Christopher (2026) Promoting women to managerial roles in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Econometrica. ISSN 0012-9682 (In Press)

Text (F2_RR2_2512) - Accepted Version Pending embargo until 1 January 2100. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB)

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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Management
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
JEL classification:	J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J1 - Demographic Economics > J16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J7 - Labor Discrimination > J71 - Discrimination M - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting > M5 - Personnel Economics > M51 - Firm Employment Decisions; Promotions (hiring, firing, turnover, part-time, temporary workers, seniority issues) M - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting > M5 - Personnel Economics > M54 - Labor Management (team formation, worker empowerment, job design, tasks and authority, work arrangemetns, job satisfaction) O - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O14 - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology O - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O15 - Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
Date Deposited:	05 Jan 2026 11:39
Last Modified:	05 Jan 2026 11:48
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/130806

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