In September 2012, the Government of Morocco inaugurated the Atlantic Free Zone (AFZ), a 345-hectare industrial park focused on automobile and electronics production. The AFZ is located approximately twenty kilometers east of the Port of Kenitra in the rural Gharb plain, a predominantly agricultural region. Since 2012, corporate investments in the AFZ have created at least 20,000 factory jobs, emblematizing state economic discourses that stress the need for liberalization, export-oriented production, and technical training for industry. For most young rural men living near the AFZ, factory jobs are the best local livelihood option to accumulate the capital necessary to create an independent household and support a family. However, few male youth from the local area gain access to these jobs, which they argue is because of nepotistic hiring practices – a common perception throughout Morocco – as well as gendered biases towards hiring women. As global supply chains extended during second-wave globalization, labor-intensive manufacturing became highly feminized in many parts of the global economy. While mainstream development studies highlighted connections between formal employment and women’s empowerment, scholars drawing on feminist political economy emphasized the confluence of patriarchal structures and capitalist pressures in the superexploitation of rural women working in factories. However, most scholarship on rural women’s factory work in the Global South, including Morocco, has focused on urban sites. While some studies do address shifts in social norms as women return to their places of origin, there is a dearth of research on how feminized industrial work sited in rural areas plays a role in reshaping local understandings of gender norms. This paper – drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in seven villages in the Gharb region – investigates how rural men of different generations discursively address the recent phenomenon of young rural women working in local factories. While both older heads of household and young unmarried men normatively assert that men should be the primary household earner and decision-maker, there are significant inter-generational differences in how men discuss the causes and social implications of female industrial labor in rural Morocco. I argue that this discursive gap demonstrates a growing realization among young men of the economic costs of patriarchy, as gendered social norms contribute to women’s competitiveness in exploitative rural labor markets. In doing so, I highlight the complex interactions between economic precarity and gendered norms at the nexus of capitalism and patriarchy in the Moroccan countryside.