促进妇女在孟加拉国服装行业担任管理职务

Promoting Women to Managerial Roles in the Bangladeshi Garment Sector Rocco MacchiavelloAndreas Menzel(LSE)(CERGE-EI Prague)Atonu RabbaniChristopher Woodruff∗(University of Dhaka)(Oxford) December 2025 AbstractWomen remain disadvantaged in promotion to managerial positions. We con- duct a field experiment with 24 large garment factories in Bangladesh to test for in-efficient representation of women among line supervisors. We identify the marginalfemale and male candidates for supervisory positions and randomly assign them tomanage production lines. We document four findings: (1) In contrast to widespreadnegative beliefs about women’s ability as supervisors at baseline, female candidatesselected by the factories had similar skills to males; (2) during the trial, females per-formed worse than males, which we show is related to negative bias against them;(3) after the trial, however, many female candidates were retained as supervisorsand, conditional on that, performed similarly to males; and (4) after the end ofour intervention, factories permanently increased the share of women among newlyappointed supervisors. A conceptual framework of experimentation over discrimi-nation rationalizes all these facts and cautions against the standard logic to test fordiscrimination: when there is uncertainty about the performance of the discrimi-nated group, equal – or even worse – performance of the marginal candidates ofthat group is no longer sufficient to rule out inefficient discrimination. Keywords: Gender Discrimination, Productivity, Export ManufacturingJEL Code: J16, J71, M51, M54, O14, O15 ∗Corresponding author:christopher.woodruff@economics.ox.ac.uk.We are grateful to the Editorand to two anonymous referees for many comments and suggestions.We also thank seminars andconferences participants at UC San Diego, the University of Washington, Notre Dame, Duke, Leuven,Ecole Polytechnique, MIT / Harvard, LSE, PUC-Chile, the CEPR-IMO and CEPR-IZA workshops,AEA-ASSA 2015, BREAD/CEPR/STICERD/TCD Conference London 2018, and DIW/CRC TRR 190Workshop Berlin 2019. Remaining failings are the responsibility of the authors. We are grateful for thecooperation and financial support of Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ),who developed the training program that we implement in the project. We are also grateful for financialand logistical support from the International Growth Centre, and financial support from the IPA SMEinitiative, the ERSC – DFID Growth Research Programme and IFC-Bangladesh, and for the cooperationof the large number of participating workers and factories in Bangladesh. Madhav Malhotra and OliverSeager provided excellent research assistance.Woodruff and Macchiavello recognize support from theERC Advanced Grant RMGPP. The project received human subjects approval under the University ofWarwick IRB (Approvals 01/11-12 and 86/13-14). 1Centre for the Study of African EconomiesDepartment of Economics.University of Oxford.Manor Road Building. Oxford OX1 3UQT: +44 (0)1865 271084.F: +44 (0)1865 281447.E: csae.enquiries@economics.ox.ac.uk.W: www.csae.ox.ac.uk 1Introduction Women remain disadvantaged around the world, notably so in promotion to lead-ership and managerial positions (Blau and Khan, 2017; Bertrand, 2017; Goldin, 2014).The underlying sources of this disadvantage, however, are not well understood. Alongsidecultural gender norms (Ashraf et al., 2023) and policies (Olivetti and Petrongolo, 2016)that hinder female labor force participation, barriers inside the organization may also im-pede women’s access to managerial roles. These barriers might be particularly relevantin newly industrializing countries as they transition from an organization of productionwhere most workers are self-employed to one in which they work under the direction ofmid-level managers employed by large firms (Gollin, 2008). Assessing whether organizational barriers hinder women’s access to managerial rolesis challenging.On average, men and women might differ in the talent required for, orpreferences for, managerial positions in a given organization.Men and women mightalso be allocated to managerial positions that differ along unobserved dimensions. If so,differences in performance between male and female managers will not reveal whetherthe under-representation of women is due to a form of discrimination.Whether taste-based or statistical, discrimination implies that the talent requirement to be consideredfor a promotion is higher for women than men. Testing for discrimination thus requirescomparing marginal candidates for promotion – rather than average differences acrossgenders within a hierarchical layer – and finding a higher performance for women relativeto men in that group, once differences in task allocation are accounted for. This paper shows that incorrect beliefs about women’s managerial ability – an or-ganizational barrier – hinder the promotion of women to managerial roles and result innon-neglig