Women's wages

Abstract

It is not easy to account for so striking an inequality; and still less easy to justify it. F. M. Eden, 1797 The strength required for the work performed by men effectively prevents women from being employed in it; and the lower rate of wages for which they work has not had any tendency, therefore, to make them more generally employed. Alfred Austin, parliamentary investigator, 1843 In the last chapter we saw that women and men tended to work in different occupations, though the sorting was not perfect and we find women working in a great range of occupations. This chapter will investigate gender differences in wages. I will first establish the size of the wage gap, and then move on to the question of why it existed. Measuring the size of the wage gap may seem straightforward, but it is in fact complicated because, as we shall see, measurement error in many cases leads to an incorrect assessment of the gap. Understanding the causes of the wage gap is even more difficult because both custom and market forces pushed women's wages below men's wages, making it difficult to determine which was the fundamental cause of wage differences. Women's wages were clearly lower than men's. Historians generally accept that women's wages were between one-third and one-half as much as men's wages.