Vikas Bajaj/The New York Times

While visiting garment factories in Bangladesh on assignment recently, I met young women who had migrated from villages to the city in search of jobs that they needed to support their families back home. It is a fairly standard story in this part of the world.

What struck me, however, was how their journeys had changed them and their views about life. Take Maasuda Akthar, who moved to Gazipur, a town 30 miles outside Dhaka, when she was 16 with her sister. (I wrote about her in this article about how the Bangladesh garment industry was benefiting from increased labor costs in China.) She married a man whom she met at the factory. As an experienced seamstress, she now makes more money than him. Ms. Akthar, 21, told me that her husband had offered to become the sole breadwinner in the home so that she could stay at home and “be comfortable,” but she refused because she enjoys working. Not only that, she told me she did not plan to have children for a few years.

My conversations with Ms. Akthar and the other woman appeared to confirm what economists, policy makers and businessmen had told me: By giving women an independent source of livelihood, Bangladesh’s garment industry has changed this conservative Muslim country’s society in immeasurable ways. (More than 80 percent of the three million people who work in the industry are women.)

I later spoke to Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at the Yale School of Management, whose research with Rachel Heath, a graduate student, applies academic rigor to those assertions.

Mr. Mobarak, a Bangladeshi who has advised his country’s government, found that the presence of apparel jobs appears to bolster school enrollments of girls, especially for young girls.

“A doubling of garment jobs causes a 6.71 percent increase in the probability that a 5-year-old girl is in school,” Mr. Mobarak writes in a summary of his findings.

Source: Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

The effect is more muted for girls 16 to 19 in age, who are more likely to drop out earlier to start working in the factories. And there is no significant effect on boys, which might be the result of the relatively low employment of men at lower levels of the industry. (Not surprisingly, men still manage and own most Bangladeshi garment factories. But in politics, Bangladesh’s two main parties are led by women – Sheikh Hasina, the current prime minister, and Khaleda Zia, a former prime minister.)

Mr. Mobarak also found that girls who live in villages with garment factories tend to marry later and have children later than the girls who grow up in villages without factories. In other countries, this has typically happened as women get more educated, but Mr. Mobarak’s survey of 1,500 families suggests that it is happening slightly differently in Bangladesh, which has a literacy rate of just 55 percent.

“Girls do seem to take advantage of these jobs at 17 to 19 years old, and that allows them to delay marriage and child bearing,” Mr. Mobarak told me in a telephone interview. “Even if it’s not happening through education, it is happening through work.”

Mr. Mobarak’s research is not yet complete, so it is hard to draw firm conclusions about what might be driving these changes. It could be that women and their families realize that they can make more money with more education. Or perhaps garment factory jobs are giving families more financial breathing room, allowing some children to stay in school while others take jobs and support the family.

His research echoes the findings of another recent paper that looked at school enrollment, this one in Indian towns and cities before and after the arrival of call centers. That research, by Emily Oster and M. Bryce Millett, shows that the introduction of one information-technology enabled services center increases school enrollment by 5.7 percent. The researchers found that English-language schools are responsible for all of the increase.

For India, Bangladesh and other developing countries, these findings provide a reason for optimism. Governments in these places are struggling to improve the quality of infrastructure — hard (highways, ports, electricity) and soft (schools, courts, basic governance) – but private forces unleashed by nascent economic reforms and globalization are not standing idly by. They are already changing societies and economies.

Wages in Bangladesh’s garment industry are among the lowest in the world. The minimum wage, which the government is expected to increase soon, is just 1,662 taka (about $23) a month. Labor groups are demanding a sharp increase and their protests and clashes with the police have periodically shut down factories in recent weeks.

Still hundreds of thousands of women flock to Dhaka and other garment hubs in Bangladesh every year because factories pay more than the women could earn in villages.

M.T. Shika, a worker I met in Dhaka, is single and lives with three other girls in a two-bedroom apartment. She sends home up to 3,000 taka (about $43) every couple of months to help support her parents. (Her three sisters are already married.)

Ms. Shika, 20, told me that she wants to wait for two or three years before she gets married and has children because she wants to save up some money first. “I want to send them to school,” she said about her future children.