The two women standing near the entrance to the iPhone factory in southern India were upset.
Parvathi and Janaki, sisters in their 20s, had come to the plant, run by major Apple supplier Foxconn, for interviews in March 2023 after seeing job ads on WhatsApp. But they had been turned away at the main gate by a security officer who stopped them and asked: “Are you married?”
“We didn’t get the jobs as we both are married,” Parvathi later said in an interview at her village shanty. “Even the auto-rickshaw driver who took us from the bus stand to the Foxconn facility told us they wouldn't take married women,” she added. “We thought we would still give it a shot.”
A Reuters investigation has found that Foxconn has systematically excluded married women from jobs at its main India iPhone assembly plant, on the grounds they have more family responsibilities than their unmarried counterparts. S. Paul, a former human-resources executive at Foxconn India, said the company’s executives verbally convey the recruitment rules to its Indian hiring agencies, which Foxconn tasks with scouting for candidates, bringing them in for interviews and employing them.
Foxconn typically doesn’t hire married women because of “cultural issues” and societal pressures, said Paul, who said he left the company in August 2023 for a better-paying role at a consulting firm. The company’s view was that there were “many issues post-marriage,” Paul added. Among them: Women “have babies after marriage.”
“Risk factors increase when you hire married women,” he said.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/foxconn-apple-india-women/ 