I t is well known that, during the industrial revolution, the gap between men's and women's wages was large. The female-male wage ratio generally varied from one-third to two-thirds, depending on the type of work and the location (see table 1). Neoclassical economic theory assumes that wages equal the marginal product of labour, and would interpret this wage gap as evidence of productivity differences. 2 However, because the wage gap is so large, many historians find the neoclassical assumption inadequate. Humphries suggests a number of reasons why the neoclassical model may be incorrect: early trade union activity, the ideology of the family wage, employers' adherence to traditional norms of what was suitable work for women, increased tensions between motherhood and economic activity, and the implications of developing ideas of respectability for sex segregation at work. 3

A major study of the role of women in the labour market of Industrial Revolution Britain. It is well known that men and women usually worked in different occupations, and that women earned lower wages than men. These differences are usually attributed to custom but Joyce Burnette here demonstrates instead that gender differences in occupations and wages were instead largely driven by market forces. Her findings reveal that rather than harming women competition actually helped them by eroding the power that male workers needed to restrict female employment and minimising the gender wage gap by sorting women into the least strength-intensive occupations. Where the strength requirements of an occupation made women less productive than men, occupational segregation maximised both economic efficiency and female incomes. She shows that women's wages were then market wages rather than customary and the gender wage gap resulted from actual differences in productivity.

Using a new sample of farm accounts from 84 farms throughout England, this article provides measures of regional variation and changes over time in female wages and employment in agriculture. Female wages were not fixed, but changed over time and responded to high demand for female labour. The female‐male wage ratio fell between 1750 and 1850, except in the industrial north west. In 1851 approximately 19 per cent of agricultural day‐labourers were female. In the industrial north west, opportunities for factory employment reduced the supply of females to agriculture, but elsewhere the relative demand for female labour in agriculture declined.

Using the wage accounts of two different farms in the 1830s and 1840s, matched with census records to determine the age of the workers, this article estimates age-wage profiles for male and female agricultural labourers. Females earned less than males, and had less wage growth over their life cycles. Male wage profiles peaked at age 30-5, earlier than the wage profiles of workers today. Before the age of 30 wage growth was more rapid than increases in strength, but less rapid than wage growth among factory workers. If wage increases after the age of 20 indicate skill acquisition, then male agricultural labourers acquired a significant amount of skill, but less skill than contemporaneous factory workers.xamining the wage profile of male cotton-factory workers in 1833, Boot concludes that the profile 'conforms closely to that predicted by human capital theory, and bears a striking resemblance to earnings profiles in the mid-twentieth century'. 2 He also finds that wage profiles in other industries were similar to those in cotton. 3 Examining the same profiles, as well as profiles from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Johnson suggests that the uniform structure of male wage profiles across industry and over time supports the claim that wages were set by custom rather than markets. 4 Both claims are based on the only available wage profiles from early nineteenth-century Britain, the wage profiles of factory workers collected by Mitchell in 1833 for the factory employment commission. 5 But were the wage profiles in manufacturing representative of the economy as a whole? This article estimates wage profiles for agricultural labourers in the 1830s and 1840s and shows that they had a very different shape from those of factory workers.Age-wage profiles are often used as an indicator of how much skill individuals acquire, as in Mincer's classic study. 6 Boot's conclusion that

The wage book of a Derbyshire farm, which includes payments to laborers for 1772 to 1775 and 1831 to 1845, allows me to examine the employment patterns of male and female day-laborers at this farm before and after important innovations in agriculture. I find a fall in relative female employment which appears to be due to a fall in demand. Male employment shifted to the spring, but female employment maintained the same seasonal pattern. These seasonal and sexual shifts in the demand for labor probably resulted from the changes in animal husbandry that followed enclosure.