Apple supplier Foxconn says no to married women seeking jobs at Tamil Nadu plant: Report

In response to questions from Reuters, Apple and Foxconn acknowledged lapses in hiring practices in 2022 and said they had worked to address the issues.

Foxconn, the supplier of the world’s second most valuable company Apple, discriminates against married women by rejecting their job applications because “they have more family responsibilities than their unmarried counterparts”. This was revealed by a new Reuters investigation published on June 25.

The report said that the smartphone manufacturer systematically excluded married women from job opportunities at its main iPhone assembly plant located at Sriperumbudur, near the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu as the world's largest contract electronics maker felt they had “more issues post marriage”.

This was corroborated by several former and current employees of more than a dozen Foxconn hiring agencies across India, many of whom spoke to the news agency on the condition of anonymity.

S Paul, a former human-resources executive at Foxconn India, said the hiring rules were verbally conveyed by company's executives to its Indian hiring agencies employed by the firm.

"Risk factors increase when you hire married women," Paul told Reuters.

In response to questions from Reuters, Apple and Foxconn acknowledged lapses in hiring practices in 2022 and said they had worked to address the issues. All the discriminatory practices documented by Reuters at the Sriperumbudur plant, however, took place in 2023 and 2024. The companies didn't address those instances. They also didn't specify whether any of the lapses in 2022 were related to the hiring of married women.

The iPhone supplier posted a 72 percent rise in first-quarter profit in May, boosted by strong demand for AI servers and coming off a low base from the period a year earlier, but the growth was lower than expected.

The Taiwanese company said net profit for the January-March quarter rose to T$22.01 billion ($679 million) from T$12.8 billion in the same period the previous year, when earnings were hit by a T$17.3 billion write-down related to its 34 percent stake in Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp.

The electronics company is also in advanced discussions with Google to locally make Pixel smartphones in Tamil Nadu, people familiar with the matter had told Moneycontrol last month.

Also read: Google to partner with Foxconn to manufacture Pixel smartphones in Tamil Nadu