1. Introduction

In the late 1970s, there were less than ten factories in Bangladesh that produced ready-made garments, or RMG. In late 2019, a few months before the global Covid-19 pandemic, there were 4,500 factories producing a turnover of 33.07 billion USD.[1] The exorbitant growth of Bangladesh into one of the world’s major RMG producers is associated with the country’s vast pool of women workers, which the industry and its promoters take to present itself as a catalyser of ‘women empowerment’ while critical voices highlight this as another instance of the gendered dimension of exploitation in global production networks. In what follows, we draw attention to fundamental changes in the gendered nature of Bangladesh’s garment workforces, and to the way these changes are related to far-ranging organizational and technological changes the industry has repeatedly gone through in Bangladesh.

[1] The EU and the US market shares constitute 61.75 percent (20.42 billion USD) and 18.20 percent (6.02 billion USD) respectively.