• Apparel exporting creates many jobs—which tend to be more formal and higher paying than other opportunities available to women with less than secondary education—but few careers.

• Lower-middle-income countries must address three barriers to expand female career opportunities: (a) low demand for career-related occupations in the service sector due to insufficient national income (low gross domestic product per capita); (b) low education levels; and (c) societal and cultural norms that inhibit or dissuade women from working.

• Low- and middle-income countries can help women transition from jobs to careers by using the apparel industry as an indirect launching pad to overcome the fixed costs of introducing more women into the labor markets.

• But this strategy will only work if countries also adopt complementary policies to boost human capital as well as labor market and family policies that define a gender-equal structure of work.