Abstract:
We use administrative data from 48 large garment factories in Bangladesh to examine pay differentials between women and men. We focus on sewing machine operators for most of our analysis. Wages are highly regulated, with the government specifying, and our firms complying with, minimum wage rates for each operator grade level. Even in a context where the average wage of operators is only a few percentage points above minimum wage, we find that men are paid 3.4 percent more than women. Most of the gap is explained by the fact that men are more likely to be in higher operator grades. We have exceptionally detailed skills data from a subset of the factories. We show that the wage- and grade-gaps are not explained by differences in skill levels. Rather, men have higher grades even conditioning on skills. Next, we show that the higher grades are not he result of factories promoting males more often than females (they do, but the magnitude of the difference is tiny). Rather, most “promotions” appear to happen when workers leave one factory and enter another factory at a higher grade. Males are more mobile than females, with average firm tenure rates across their careers that are 7 months, or 25 percent, shorter. We explore two reasons why men may be more mobile: women face higher costs of changing factories because they are juggling household responsibilities as well as work, and men have stronger incentives to be promoted because they ultimately want to be promoted into management, a path that is all but foreclosed to women. We find somewhat more evidence for the latter channel.