Sexual Violence, Wage-gap, and Female Workers Turnovers in Multinational Firms: The Case of Hawassa Industrial Parks in Ethiopia

In African countries like
Ethiopia, FDI is currently creating many job opportunities. For Ethiopia, the
second-most populous country in Africa with over 120 million people, of which
over 51% are female with high gender inequality (such as in education, labor
market, and asset ownership), FDI plays an important role in promoting
structural transformation, labor market, and gender equality (Mains &
Mulat, 2021; van-den-Broeck et al., 2022). Approximately 86,000
workers were employed in 189 multinational corporations (MNCs) in Ethiopia’s
industrial parks (developed as a vital strategy to attract FDI) before the
COVID-19 pandemic, with women making up 80% of the workforce (Meyer et al.,
2021). Women’s participation is higher than men’s, which is fantastic. However,
labor turnover and absenteeism are high, on average, only 42% of workers from
the previous year continue to work in the current year (CEPHEUS, 2019; Mains
& Mulat, 2021; World Bank, 2022). This makes the hoped transfer of
knowledge and technology through labor mobility problematic because it will not
occur unless local workers have reasonable long-term experience in foreign
firms. Hwassa Industrial Park, the largest state-owned park in Ethiopia, has
many MNEs with high turnover. This forces us to ask questions: since the
majority of workers are women, is there any sexual violence causes worker
turnover to be high? Is there a wage gap that causes worker turnover to be
high?  What conditions expose workers to sexual violence? Are there any
preventive and curative mechanism in place to address the problem of sexual
violence?