Baseline and Midline Follow-Up Data for Leadership Promotion Interventions in Bangladeshi Garment Sector, 2019–2021

The Early Career Intervention (ECI) project builds on earlier work by the team aiming to increase the share of female supervisors on sewing floor production lines in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment sector. ECI began as a pilot with three factories. The research team asked each of the three factories to nominate up to 50 sewing machine operators for training, with an equal. Number of females and males. Each of the operators nominated by the factory was given a diagnostic survey which measured basic skills (numeracy, literacy and knowledge of garment production) and interest in being a supervisor. Those workers scoring above the passing level in the diagnostic (a large majority of those nominated in each of the three factories) were randomly allocated to either treatment or control. Those in the treatment group were scheduled to receive three hours of training each fortnight for one year. [Note that the training was cut short by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.] Our primary outcomes of interest were employee retention and promotion to supervisory roles.

The overwhelming majority of the 4 million workers in the Bangladeshi garment sector are female, but managers at all levels are almost exclusively male. In a series of projects, we have examined the challenges of transitioning women into supervisory roles. The first of the projects was funded through the DfID-ESRC Growth Research Program (ES/J009466/1). Our research has helped factories select better female candidates for supervisory positions, helped training providers hone the content of their training, and led to an increase in female supervisors in the sector. Long-term follow-up data from 44 project factories indicates that the percentage of female supervisors doubled from four percent to over eight percent between 2016 and 2017. In this project, we aim to build on both the momentum toward female leadership and the lessons learned from the earlier research to help training providers deliver more effective training over a longer training window, while preparing women for leadership positions from an early point in their careers. We will evaluate a pilot training program that aims to intervene earlier in the women's career in the sector, with training spread over a longer period of time. We aim to understand if the earlier and more sustained intervention induces women to invest more in the skills necessary to be effective supervisors; increases their confidence when they are working as supervisors; increases retention rates in the factory and sector; and makes them more effective supervisors after they are promoted. We will work with factories to identify candidates for the training program and work with trainers to customise a training program covering both soft skills - leadership, communication and confidence - and hard skills - line balancing, performance measurement, etc. Training will be spread over a period of one year, with half-day sessions fortnightly. The research will benefit garment sector producers and buyers. If the evaluation demonstrates that the training provides benefits that exceed its costs, we would expect dissemination of the results to lead to adoption of the training program, or parts of it, into the typical in-house training that factories provide for supervisor skills development for female workers. Moreover, the detailed analysis of the program will provide insights to the challenges and barriers to promoting women that will be useful to management personnel. We expect the project will encourage factory management to consider women for promotion. External training agencies that work with factories, such as Suddoko or BetterWork, may also be interested in incorporating some, or all, of the training components into their curriculum if deemed successful.

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