The International Labour Organization looked at pay across nine garment exporting countries and found women earning, on average, 18.5 per cent less than men in the same sector. Of that gap, only around four percentage points could be attributed to measurable things: age, education, years of experience, hours worked. The remainder is what statisticians call unexplained, which is a careful word for something rather less careful.
I have been on a lot of production floors in twenty years, and the shape of it is visible before anyone opens a payroll file. The rows of machines are women. The people walking between the rows with a clipboard are usually men. The cutting room, where the pay grade is higher and the machinery heavier, is usually men. Nobody has written this arrangement down. It is simply how the jobs got sorted, in factory after factory, on three continents.
The gap sits in the job title, not the pay slip
Almost nowhere does a factory pay a woman less than a man for the identical grade. The gap is built earlier, in three places. The first is grading. A helper trims threads, bundles work and moves it between stations. An operator runs a machine. The distance between those two roles is small in skill and large in pay, and the move is discretionary: a supervisor decides who gets promoted onto a machine and when.
The second is overtime, which is where garment wages are actually made. Access to overtime is allocated rather than automatic, and a worker who has to leave at six for childcare earns less than a worker on an identical base rate who does not. The third is supervision itself, which is where the ceiling sits, and which in most of the factories I have visited is held by men who came up through cutting or mechanics rather than through sewing.
Why this belongs in a school's conversation
School communities, in Spain and in most countries I know, are largely organised by mothers. The AMPA meeting, the second-hand rail, the group chat about PE kit, the person who ends up counting the polo shirts. There is something worth noticing in the fact that the unpaid organising at one end of this chain and the undervalued paid work at the other are done by broadly the same demographic.
I do not want to draw that parallel too neatly. The material circumstances are not comparable and it would be dishonest to imply they are. But recognition is a sturdier basis for interest than pity is, and it tends to produce better questions.
Three questions that actually reach a payslip
Ask for the gender breakdown by job grade rather than by headcount. Headcount is flattering and almost always quoted: eighty per cent of our workforce is women. Grade breakdown is where the picture changes, because it shows you who is on a machine, who is helping, and who is supervising. Ask whether overtime is recorded per worker and whether that record can be shown. And ask whether there is a complaint channel a worker can use that does not pass through her line supervisor, since a grievance system that runs through the person you are complaining about is a filing cabinet, not a mechanism.
None of those can be answered with a certificate. They are answered with a spreadsheet, which is exactly why the answers are worth having. A factory that has never disaggregated its own payroll by grade will say so, usually with some surprise, and that in itself tells you where you are starting from.
I cannot tell you that our supply chain has closed this gap, and I am not going to pretend otherwise on a page selling school uniform. What I can tell you is which facility produced which production lot, that these questions are asked, and that the answers are recorded rather than compressed into a reassuring word on a swing tag. Where a supplier has not been able to answer, the record says unanswered. It makes for a less satisfying report. It is the only kind worth reading.