Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain Eric Schneider (bio) Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. By Joyce Burnette. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+377. £55. This book is the most forceful argument to date that gender wage differences and occupational sorting during the Industrial Revolution were based on market responses to real differences between male and female productivity, not on gender discrimination or custom. Joyce Burnette argues that productivity differences between the genders can be explained by two key factors. Most important, men's greater strength gave them a productivity advantage over women in manual labor, which resulted in men receiving higher wages for their greater productivity. Differences in human capital between men and women also contributed to the gender wage gap. Burnette sees strength as exogenous to the economic system because it was a product of biology, and human capital as endogenous because men and women had different incentives to invest in human capital. Thus, women earned approximately one-half to two-thirds the salaries of men performing the same task for equal periods of time because they were less productive. This argument challenges earlier historiography, which has emphasized the role of ideology, gender discrimination, and custom in determining women's wages. Burnette argues that ideological concepts of "women's work" rarely limited the industries in which women could work. Instead, conceptions of women's work reflected natural and efficient occupational segregation and were later harnessed by male unions in noncompetitive markets to justify the exclusion of women. Gender discrimination did not influence wages because men and women were given equal piece-rate wages for producing the same goods. Finally, women's wages were not set by custom because they varied over time and were responsive to regional economic pressures. Burnette also argues that, in competitive labor markets, occupational sorting based on strength decreased the gender difference in wages by allowing women to specialize in low-strength industries where they could [End Page 195] be more productive. This was the most efficient outcome for women and the economy as a whole. However, women were sometimes excluded from industries where labor markets were less competitive by men's distributional coalitions, which used ideological and discriminatory language to justify their attempt to maintain higher wages by excluding women. This outcome was less efficient for women and the economy. Of particular interest to the readership of this journal will be Burnette's discussion of how technological change shifted occupational structure. Because hand spinning in preindustrial England required little strength, women had a comparative advantage and performed most spinning work. Even with several substantial improvements in spinning technology in the early years of the Industrial Revolution—the spinning jenny and throstle—women continued to dominate the spinning industry because these new technologies were not strength-intensive. However, with the invention of mule-spinning, a task requiring a great deal of strength, women were pushed out of the spinning industry because men had a greater comparative advantage. After men became dominant in mule-spinning, they created unions and successfully excluded women after the self-actor decreased the strength requirements necessary to operate the machine. Thus new technology that either increased or decreased strength requirements could significantly influence occupational sorting in the economy. I agree with Burnette that strength did create real differences in productivity between men and women, but these productivity differences could have had an endogenous as well as exogenous determinant. For example, Burnette too readily dismisses the influence of gender inequality in the distribution of food in the household, which has been shown to leave women in a weaker and less-productive state than men. Therefore, it may not be possible to remove gender roles and ideology from gender differences in productivity and wages, even if wages were determined by the marginal product of female and male labor. In addition, in order to definitively prove that wage differences were determined by productivity differences and not by custom, Burnette would have to show quantitatively that wage differences were greater for occupations where strength was more important than in occupations where strength was not important. This is a difficult task given the paucity and nature...