Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain

Abstract

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.

The Malthusian intermezzo: Women's wages and human capital formation between the late Middle Ages and the demographic transition of the 19th century

“…1 He also measured the degree to which women's wages were lower than those for men, and came to the conclusion that the female dummy before 1560 was much lower than after 1560, which points in the same direction (but unfortunately he did not test this in more detail). Similar evidence for the late 18th and early 19th century has been published by Joyce Burnette (1997Burnette ( , 2008. The agricultural wage data in particular point to a further decline of relative wages of women: between 1760 and 1800 she estimated a wage ratio of about .48, declining to .42 between 1800 and 1840.…”

“…This, however, was probably changing in the early modern period. To establish what happened, it is possible to build on the work of a number of scholars, including Sandy Bardsley (1999), John Langdon (2010) and Joyce Burnette (2008), who have, for various periods (the High Middle Ages and the 18th and early 19th century) put together a lot of data pointing at the same trends that will be identified here. The real problem is to compare like with like: how to control for the kind of jobs they did, and for the region (and obviously the period) concerned.…”

Digital humanities and the history of working women: a cascade

“…Perhaps it is the illusion of the present, where one is often inclined to believe that knowledge is expanding more rapidly than in the past, but it might not be entirely illusory to believe that these components are stronger than ever, and mutually supportive. It is, we believe, no coincidence that a number of fine essays (Goose, 2007;Janssens, 1997;Sharpe, 1996) and works of synthesis based on studies processing vital registers as well as census material have recently appeared (Battagliola, 2000;Burnette, 2008;Goldin, 1990;Vikström, 2010). And we will no doubt be seeing more appear in the near future as the cascade of data, occupation-based measures, and statistical methods we are currently witnessing translates into ever more innovative and wide-ranging studies.…”

German stagnation versus Swedish progression: gender wage gaps in comparison, 1960–2006

“…wage structures, gender earning gaps and wage dispersion in OECD countries, are Freeman and Katz (1995). Gender gaps are also covered by Blau and Kahn (1992 and Burnette (2008) for an earlier time period than that covered here. A long-run analysis of gender wage differences in the period 1920-1995 in Sweden is provided by Svensson (2003Svensson ( , 2004 in a similar approach to Goldin (1990) for the United States.…”