Women workers and the contestation of gender roles in Vietnam’s new rural factories

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Vietnam garment factories are increasingly moving to rural areas, encouraged by government incentives and labour shortages. Many factories predominantly employ women, and in this article we examine the experiences of 12 women working at a factory in their home village in northern Vietnam. Factory work, because it is in the formal sector, has made visible to the women’s families and their communities that they are ‘workers’, in contrast to the invisibility of domestic and family agriculture work. Taking an empowerment approach to frame this study, we argue that their new financial resources and visibility as workers led them to challenge gendered roles in their households in important ways, including around financial decision-making and the distribution of domestic work. They also felt their status within the community was elevated. However, our findings show that empowerment is conditional, incremental and constrained by patriarchal familial dynamics and gendered societal scripts. As with elsewhere, the tensions between factory work as a form of empowerment and as a form of exploitation are inherently linked, and women’s gendered identities shape the ways factory owners are able to create a cheaper factory workforce in rural Vietnam.