Roughly three out of every four workers in Cambodia's garment, footwear and travel goods sector are women.
The industry itself is huge. In 2025, the garment, footwear and travel goods sector employed more than 1.11 million people across 1,810 firms. About 75 percent of them were women.
Those figures come from Better Work, a joint programme of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group.
In Cambodia, it operates as Better Factories Cambodia and has monitored garment factories since 2001. Its factory assessments are a legal requirement for garment exporters in the country.
The sector also carries much of the national economy. It made up 51.8 percent of Cambodia's total exports that year, more than any other sector. In other words, a sector responsible for more than half of Cambodia's exports relies on a workforce that is about three quarters female.
Started With Export Factories in the 1990s
Cambodia's garment industry took off in the mid-1990s, when investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore began setting up export factories in the country.
They were drawn by quota free access to the US and EU markets and relatively low wages, according to the Overseas Development Institute. A 1999 trade agreement with the United States helped the industry grow further by tying larger clothing quotas to better working conditions in the factories.
Most of the people who filled those factories were women. An ILO study on gender equality among Cambodian garment workers describes young women leaving poor rural provinces for factory jobs. Poverty and a lack of wage work pushed them out of their villages, while the prospect of a regular wage pulled them toward the manufacturing centres.
The share of women has remained high over the years, although estimates vary across studies and datasets.
A Better Work case study, From the Ground Up: Empowering Women Leaders in Cambodian Garment Sector (May 2024), put it at over 80 percent and said most garment workers were domestic migrant women. Better Work's 2024 annual report gave a range of 75 to 80 percent, and its latest data for 2025 puts it at around 75 percent.
The Factory Meant a Regular Paycheck
Many garment workers are domestic migrants, meaning they left their home provinces to work in factories, these workers send home an average of 40 percent of their salary.
According to the ILO's Cambodia Garment and Footwear Sector Bulletin (Issue 8, December 2018), which drew on the 2016 Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey, the garment, textile and footwear sector directly employed around one million people.
The survey data showed that the sector's wages supported roughly one in five Cambodian households, about 700,000 in total. Around 3.4 million people, almost 22 percent of the population, lived in a household with at least one garment, textile or footwear worker.
The jobs were also regular and formal, which is not the norm in Cambodia.
In many other sectors, most workers are self employed or help out in a family business. In the garment, textile and footwear sector, the ILO found that more than 90 percent of the workforce held regular, formal employment.
Filled the Sewing Lines, But Not the Top Jobs
Women make up the majority of garment workers worldwide, according to Better Work. The same ILO study noted that export oriented textile industries from the Americas to North Africa and Asia rely heavily on women workers.
In Cambodia, the study found that factories prefer women on the assembly line, and that some job announcements asked for female workers. Of the 125 sewing workers in its survey sample, 119 were women.
Factory managers interviewed by the researchers said more women than men apply for sewing jobs and that sewing has traditionally been women's work, while workers said women were favoured because they were seen as more obedient.
The work was not evenly divided.
The ILO study described strong occupational segregation, sewing was almost entirely done by women, while men made up most of the workforce in departments such as quality control, which paid more and offered better conditions. For most workers, the only promotion available was to group leader.
More recent research points the same way. Better Factories Cambodia's 2018 report Towards Gender Equality, based on data from 395 factories in 2016-17, found that women were about 85 percent of apparel workers but underrepresented in leadership roles.
It linked this partly to the difficulty of combining factory work with family care. According to the ILO's sector bulletin, women in the sector also earned about 13 percent less than men on average in 2016, a raw comparison that did not control for occupation.
A Sector That Carries Half of Cambodia's Exports
Changes in the garment industry are felt well beyond factory gates because of its size in the national economy.
In 2025, Cambodia exported about US$15.5 billion worth of garments, footwear and travel goods, according to the Ministry of Commerce. Better Work puts the sector's share of total exports that year at 51.8 percent, and its workforce at more than 1.11 million people.
The sector relies on a few markets. In 2024, the United States took about 38.5 percent of its export revenue and the European Union about 28 percent, according to a sector brief by TAFTAC and EuroCham Cambodia.
Any change in the rules governing those markets would apply to a workforce of more than 1.11 million people, about three quarters of them women.
