In the more economically developed countries, one just needs to replace the factory with retail and catering service industries, HSBC gender pay gap, for example, budget airlines workers, migrant workers in farming industry (e.g. Italy and Spain), or as cleaners, low paid essential workers (e.g. nurses in England), Amazon workers, etc. The following was written in 1976, but I think is still largely relevant globally.
“The hard core of the bourgeois feminist movements has typically been the ‘career women’ elements, business and professional strivers above all. Protective devices for the benefit of women workers in factories help to make life more bearable for them, but they are usually irrelevant to upper-echelon women trying to get ahead in professions. Worse, they may introduce restrictions which get in the way. At the very least, the ‘pure’ feminists demonstrate their social purity by rejecting the idea that the women’s question has something to do with class issues. Protective legislation for women workers is, abstractly considered, a form of ‘sex discrimination’ – just as legislation for men workers is a form of ‘class legislation’ and was long denounced as such. The bourgeois feminists are better served by making feminine equality as abstract an issue as possible, above all abstracted from the social struggle of classes.”
—Hal Draper, 1976
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