Challenges of Change: Testing Marginal Female Candidates as Line Supervisors in Bangladesh's Garment Sector

In Bangladesh's ready-made garment (RMG) sector, roughly 80% of production-line workers are women but about 95% of line supervisors are men — a gap long assumed to reflect a shortage of qualified female candidates.

The study aimed to isolate statistical discrimination from real skill differences by testing whether 'marginal' female candidates — equally qualified to their male counterparts on baseline skills diagnostics — could succeed as line supervisors when given the chance.

Researchers from the University of Warwick, University of Oxford and University of Dhaka worked with 24 large garment factories to identify 'marginal' candidates for supervisor promotion — men and women whose baseline skills diagnostics showed no meaningful difference — and randomly assigned them to manage real production lines.

At the outset, the newly promoted female supervisors received significantly lower productivity readings and worker evaluations than their male counterparts, driven by workers' negative prior beliefs about women's management ability rather than an actual skills gap; after roughly four months, performance and evaluations converged. The share of female candidates still working as line supervisors after the trial was significantly higher than the baseline share of female supervisors in the same factories, and the experience shifted male workers' expectations about promotion and tenure.

The published results describe averages across the participating factories rather than a single headline productivity percentage, and effects on turnover and wages beyond the trial period are not tracked in the publicly available working paper.