How the Garment Supply Chain's Gender Pay Gap Undermines Social Compliance
A few steps forward but still a long way to go. That's the gist of the Social & Labor Convergence Program's latest impact report, which delved into data gathered by the multi-stakeholder initiative's harmonized audit framework—including, for the first time, information pertaining to gender dynamics—as it enters its sixth year of adoption by the apparel, footwear and textiles supply chain.
Broadly speaking, the 10,200 SLCP assessments conducted in more than 50 countries in 2024—10 percent more than in 2023—found fewer violations of national and international labor laws. By replacing multiple, often redundant, audits, the Converged Assessment Framework also unlocked a potential $39 million for reinvesting in—ideally—improving labor conditions for roughly 7.3 million workers, a 39 percent uptick from the year before. There remained glaring paint points such as excessive overtime and shortfalls in wages and benefits, but overall, CEO Janet Mensink views the results as a validation of the Cascale spinoff's 'theory of change.'
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'One of our principles and theories is that facility ownership of their data will drive accountability and change because they also take responsibility for the outcomes,' she said. 'So there's that whole process that starts with self-assessment and then continues with verification, but they are the ones that get to decide whether they share it with brands or any other stakeholders.'
Mensink had just stepped off the main stage at the Global Fashion Summit: Copenhagen Edition, where she had been speaking on a panel about the gender pay gap. The session's initial hook was PricewaterhouseCoopers and Global Fashion Agenda's report about wage inequities in Italy's fashion manufacturing value chain, where women are overrepresented in lower-paying positions on the production line and underrepresented in the higher executive echelons.
The same is true of countries such as Bangladesh, China, India, Turkey, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, where SLCP's assessments are most embraced, Mensink said. Although women comprise 59 percent of the workforce in SLCP facilities, men account for 67 percent of the supervisory or managerial positions, the report found. As in Italy, the women toil in so-called 'less-skilled' jobs that, if one would put a positive spin on things, means plenty of untapped opportunities to leverage the 'diversity dividend' of investing in inclusive leadership. On the flip side, such disparate power dynamics have been linked to increased incidences of gender-based violence and harassment that lead to psychological, physical and sexual abuse.
Despite women representing 60 percent of workers, 45 percent of SLCP facilities paid men more than women in the same or similar positions in 2024. While the gap can vary wildly, ranging from a fraction of a percentage to more than 10 percent, the fact that it exists signals what the report said is a 'troubling imbalance in opportunity, recognition and reward' and undermines the fundamental concept of equal pay for equal work.
Despite the overall growth in SLCP users—2024 alone saw a 10 percent bump—there has been 'no meaningful increase' in the representation of women in supervisory roles. Only 25 percent of SLCP facilities are managed or owned by women. And while 61 percent of them offered promotions to men in 2024, just 39 percent did the same for their female counterparts. Men, the report pointed out, are still largely favored for advancement at the individual facility level.
Overtime is 'very much' connected with the pay gap, Mensink said, since workers who earn less than what they can survive on will seek to rack up hours to make up for the deficiency. A root cause of this is unfair purchasing practices.
'If you want to address over time, you cannot just you can't just ask your supplier, hey, remediate this,' she said. 'This is a collective effort that is a supply chain issue, not a sustainability issue in itself. There isn't a training to fix overtime.'
At the same time, she added, the data shows that factories led by women have better control over their working hours, which means setting them up for success can have larger positive implications. This means providing things like childcare assistance (which is mandatory in Bangladesh and India), menstrual products and maternity leave, which are all valuable data points for SLCP and important subjects of dialogue between buyers and suppliers.
That facilities should have autonomy over their own data, however, is something of a no-brainer for Mensink. She said she doesn't believe in a 'top-down approach' where buyers call all the shots because 'that's actually one of the underlying issues why there are non-compliances in the first place.'
Mensink said that non-compliance isn't easy to fix in facilities because they're so systemic and often come with nested dependencies. It isn't for nothing, after all, that 92 percent of SLCP assessments in 2024 found at least one occurrence of non-compliance, a 1 percent decrease from 2023. The average number of legal non-compliances per assessment? 10.3, a 3 percent increase from the year before.
At the same time, the report found, repeat users of the Converged Assessment Framework reported 1.9 fewer incidents of non-compliance compared with first-time users. In 2024, the average frequency of non-compliant behavior for repeat users of the assessment over four years was 2.4 times lower than repeat users over two years.
'But there's still so much work to do,' Mensink said. 'We're finding cases also on harassment, discrimination, forced labor, issues with migrant labor, but these are way more challenging in an assessment context. There's also a lot that we need to do in collaboration with other organizations that are better equipped to get the true worker voice. I mean, freedom of association is one of the key things to address, but how do you do that? Plus, there are limitations in an annual on-site inspection. It's a snapshot. And you need a skilled verifier to identify more salient issues, so we're constantly updating and building the capacity of our verifiers.'
SLCP is often flooded with requests for new data points. Mensink thinks there needs to be a balance, however, between making the Converged Assessment Framework fit for purpose and plunging into ever-more granular levels of information that could make assessments unwieldy or unsuitable for drawing out long-term trends. So far, beyond the addition of wage and gender data, last year, the organization has kept to incremental annual improvements. A climate element could be the next big one.
'We're also looking at, probably in the future, ways to work with other organizations on grievance mechanisms, hotlines, etc., because the idea of finding everything in one assessment as good as it is is probably a bit ambitious,' she said. 'It's about finding a middle ground through modularity. But we will never be a static system.'
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