Gendered exit and displacement: Social reproduction and automation in Bangladesh’s garment industry

Women have long underwritten the global garment industry while disproportionately bearing the burden of its coercive labor regimes. In Bangladesh—the world’s second-largest apparel exporter after China—this feminization was widely celebrated as a development success that incorporated millions of women into formal employment. Yet the narrative is fraying: women’s share of the ready-made garment workforce has fallen from roughly 80% in the 1980s to about 50% today. What explains this retreat from an industry once framed as a conduit to empowerment? Drawing on a survey of 285 former women garment workers, five focus-group discussions, and 16 key informant interviews, we theorize defeminization as the outcome of two analytically distinct yet mutually reinforcing mechanisms. First, gendered exit reflects the institutional devaluation of social reproduction: care burdens, scarce childcare provision, and stringent factory discipline render women’s employment precariously contingent. Second, gendered displacement and resegregation accompany technological upgrading as machine-adjacent and supervisory pathways expand, while exclusionary training and patriarchal narratives channel these roles toward men. The article presents evidence from former workers to show how export-oriented restructuring under technological intensification reorganizes gender hierarchies within global production networks.