In early April, the US government announced unprecedented tariff increases on imports, framed as being directed to countries. But what about the millions of people within the countries who depend on exports for their livelihoods? This article recalls how women workers in the countries threatened with the highest tariffs are so vulnerable – noting that this is no accident but rather an inherent feature of the liberalized trading system as we know it.

The list of countries facing the highest tariffs on their exports to the US – Lesotho (50%), Cambodia (49%), Laos (48%), Madagascar (47%) and Vietnam (46%) – reads like a list of the places where women workers are the most vulnerable to trade shocks.

Women’s work in the most affected countries

The most exposed sector is textiles and garments, a female-intensive industry in which working conditions tend to be poor and women’s wages low. Increased customs duties puts their jobs at risk – as does the general uncertainty which prevails even as the tariffs announced on 2 April have been put on hold.

The profiles of Cambodia, Lesotho and Vietnam are textbook cases of the role of women export-oriented textile production in the developing countries facing the highest US tariff hikes.

Cambodia

Textiles and garments—including footwear and travel goods—made up 57% of Cambodia’s exports, valued at $22.5 billion in 2022. The US is the country’s largest export market, contributing around a quarter of its GDP. The industry’s 800’000 jobs makes it the country’s largest formal employer. Women – mostly aged under 30 – represent 80% of the workforce in the textile and garment sector. There is a gender wage gap: women earn less and are over-represented in lower status and lower skill roles. Working conditions are often poor. In recent years employers have increasingly been offering short-term contracts and outsourcing production to smaller, informal enterprises. Some 20% of Cambodia’s population lives below the poverty line.

Lesotho

Textiles and footwear are the main exports to the US from Lesotho – about three quarters of Lesotho’s production is destined for the US, for brands like Levi’s, Wrangler or Gap. The industry accounts for about 20% of Lesotho’s GDP and is the largest private employer in the country, employing 30’000 people – mostly women. Wages are low, and women face gender equality deficits and regularly report sexual assault and harassment. Nearly half of Lesotho’s population live below the poverty line.

Vietnam

About 30% of Vietnam’s GDP comes from exports to the US, with textiles alone accounting for 16%. The US is its largest market, accounting for a revenue of around USD $11 billion in 2023. Vietnam is a manufacturing hub for companies such as Nike, Adidas or Uniqlo. The sector employs some 2.5 million women, accounting for 74.8 % of the workforce. The gender wage gap stood at 9.3% in 2023, and is mainly explained by the fact that female workers often engage in lower-skilled tasks and work less overtime due to gender-related responsibilities. Most women are engaged on temporary contracts, and safety concerns persist. Less than 4% of the Vietnamese population lives under the poverty line.

Women as a source of competitive advantage

The prevalence of women workers in textile production in many developing countries is no coincidence: the very reason for investments in the sector is the cheap women’s labour in countries with easy access to markets like Europe’s and North America’s.

Export-oriented production from the 1960s onwards drew on women’s low wages. It enabled a massive influx of women workers into the workforce, initially into labour-intensive manufacturing production and more recently services. Increased female labour force participation has contributed to poverty reduction, women’s empowerment and social development around the world.

Yet women have fewer chances to access the – male-dominated – higher-value-added jobs. Women are less likely than men to join a trade union, to participate in professional training or to work overtime. Employers take advantage of gendered social norms and the crucial fact that women have more care duties than men, to keep their pay low. These factors combine to keep women in the lower echelons of the job market.

The textiles industry illustrates this perfectly. Women are overrepresented in lower-skill roles, their wages are low and they are frequently engaged as subcontractors or on temporary contracts. In addition, they are often subjected to violations of their rights and exposed to harassment and difficult working conditions.

Textiles is a cut-throat sector, subject to intense international competition. Buyers put suppliers under pressure to deliver at short notice and to keep prices low. As labour constitutes a large proportion of production costs, women’s cheaper labour is essential for a textile factory to survive. Employers often use women’s labour as a company safety valve in hard times. If labour costs go up, sales income goes down or conditions of access to foreign markets change, factories will lay off workers or investors will move production elsewhere.

Either way, women lose out more than men. Not only are they the majority of the textiles sector workforce, their relatively precarious status mean that they are the first to lose their jobs – as has been the case in past recessions or trade shocks, such as when COVID suddenly halted clothes sales. In addition, women’s lower wages make them less able to withstand the shock of loss of income. And because women spend a greater share of their income on food and other essentials, the impacts of their job losses ripple through households and communities.

Footloose and US-free

Textile imports into the US dropped drastically between March and April. As the sector grapples with lower sales, added costs and market uncertainty due to lack of clarity on future US tariff rates, there are reports of leading US fashion brands such as Levi’s, Walmart or Gap asking for discounts from their Bangladesh factory suppliers. And as early as February Shein was said to have been asking leading factories to move production sites from China to Vietnam, in anticipation of higher US tariffs on Chinese imports.

Past experience shows how footloose investment in textiles is. In response to rising women’s wages, textile production shifted from Mauritius to Madagascar in the 1990s. After the expiration of the Multi-Fibre Agreement – a preferential tariff arrangement – investors rapidly moved production from Central America and Africa to Asia. 

This article does not purport to further demonstrate the absurdity or moral reprehensibility of Trump’s stated tariff logic – others are ably doing that. Still, it’s worth asking the question:

Will textile production move in response to the current trading landscape? Possibly.

To the US?

“Absolutely not” says Casey Barnett, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia. Even though 97% of clothing sold in the US is imported, industry experts agree that the chances of production moving to America are virtually nil.

Clarifying the “pink tariff” narrative

Before turning again to consider the rights of women in global value chains, let us briefly consider the tariff-related gender equality question that has caught the mainstream media’s attention: the “pink tariff.” A study comparing 200’000 paired tariff rates on men’s and women’s products in 167 countries found that women’s goods do face tariffs higher on average than the equivalent men’s items. In the US, tariff rates on women’s clothing are 2.9 percentage points higher than the already-high 13.6% average tariff rate for men’s clothing. (Interestingly, the global study also found that women’s presence in the legislature is associated with lower tariffs on women’s goods. As if to confirm this, in January 2025 two US congresswomen introduced legislation to direct the US government to examine the impact of tariffs on women and other consumer groups.)

What the pink tariff narrative conceals is the gendered pattern of household consumption: women spend a higher portion of their income on clothes for the family, be it boys’ t-shirts, girls’ dresses or men’s underwear. The lower a women’s wages, the bigger the proportion of her income she will spend on clothes.

In other words, the pink tariff question is not about women’s clothes but about how the burden of tariffs on essential goods falls harder on women than on men, and hardest of all on women in the poorest households. This is amplified by the fact that cheap, mass-market goods are subject to higher rates than luxury items.

The US tariff structure already penalized low-income women. New increases will deepen their financial strain.

Neglecting women’s disposable labour in global value chains

Trade shocks are not new. COVID, wars and climatic factors are examples of previous ones, and the world will face other shocks in the future. But it is not the current shock – in the form of additional US import duties – that has caused the structural factors that put so many women’s rights at risk. This shock is merely another harsh reminder that global supply chains, designed for efficiency and profit, rely on the expendability of women’s labour.

Over the past decade, international trade fora have been increasing their focus on women in trade, with governments and intergovernmental agencies alike implementing activities to promote gender equality in trade. UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was a pioneer in this, with its early work engaging with the multiple facets of the trade and gender equality relationship. UNCTAD’s broad approach documented economic expectations as well as the realities of how trade policies impact women, reminding policy-makers that gendered impacts of trade vary depending on women’s position in the economy. It has offered granular research and recommended policies – such as social infrastructure investments – that address the societal factors that hold women back in the global economy and keep them at the bottom of global value changes.

The prevailing narrative in trade circles now is that trade can dramatically improve women’s lives. Most international trade initiatives focus on helping women entrepreneurs access international markets – an approach that benefits only a small minority of women while diverting attention from the structural factors that perpetuate the exploitation of women workers.

Overall, international trade agencies appear stuck at the “empowering women entrepreneurs” stage, when what is really needed is meaningful engagement with the complex links between job quality, women’s rights, global competition, and economic equity between countries.

Discussions of workers’ rights in multilateral trade contexts has been fraught, with – justified – fears that higher labour standards would erode many countries’ competitiveness. But the current situation, with US tariffs targeting already poor and vulnerable workers, once again requires the world to live up to its responsibilities to the women who produce our clothes. Consumers need to buy more responsibly. Governments need to step up and recognize the need for multilateral action in favour of global economic justice, if only to do right by the millions of women who work for us.

Hopefully, the current furore and disquiet over US tariff policy will help trigger greater awareness and action.

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An earlier version of this article was published as a Forum on Trade, Environment and the SDGs expert view.

Other analysis of the links between gender equality and trade is here and here.