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Gender, Productivity and the Nature of Work and Pay: Evidence from the Late Nineteenth-Century Tobacco Industry

Author

Listed:
  • Björn Eriksson
  • Tobias Karlsson
  • Tim Leunig
  • Maria Stanfors
Abstract
Women have, on average, been less well-paid than men throughout history. Prior to 1900, most economic historians see the gender wage gap as a reflection of men's greater strength and correspondingly higher productivity. This paper investigates the gender wage gap in cigar making around 1900. Strength was rarely an issue, but the gender wage gap was large. Two findings suggest that employers were not sexist. First, differences in earnings by gender for workers paid piece rates can be fully explained by differences in experience and other productivity-related characteristics. Second, conditioning on those characteristics, women were just as likely to be promoted to the better paying piece rate section. Neither finding is compatible with a simple model of sex-based discrimination. Instead, the gender wage gap can be decomposed into two components. First, women were typically less experienced, in an industry in which experience mattered. Second there were some jobs that required strength, for which men were better suited. Because strength was so valuable in the other jobs at this time, men commanded a wage premium in the general labour market, raising their reservation wage. Hiring a man required the firm to pay a 'man's wage'. This implies that firms that were slow to feminise their time rate workforce ended up with a higher cost structure than those that made the transition more quickly. We show that firms with a higher proportion of women in their workforce in 1863 were indeed more likely to survive 35 years later.

Suggested Citation

  • Björn Eriksson & Tobias Karlsson & Tim Leunig & Maria Stanfors, 2011. "Gender, Productivity and the Nature of Work and Pay: Evidence from the Late Nineteenth-Century Tobacco Industry," CEP Discussion Papers dp1053, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1053
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Burnette, Joyce & Stanfors, Stanfors, 2018. "Understanding the gender gap among turn-of-the-century Swedish compositors," Working Paper Series 2018:1, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    2. Karlsson, Tobias & Stanfors, Maria, 2016. "To be or not to be? Risk attitudes and gender differences in union membership," Lund Papers in Economic History 144, Lund University, Department of Economic History.
    3. Youssouf Merouani & Faustine Perrin, 2022. "Gender and the long-run development process. A survey of the literature [Rethinking age heaping: A cautionary tale from nineteenth-century Italy]," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 26(4), pages 612-641.
    4. Bj�rn Eriksson & Maria Stanfors, 2015. "A winning strategy? The employment of women and firm longevity during industrialisation," Business History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(7), pages 988-1004, October.
    5. Kumon, Yuzuru & Sakai, Kazuho, 2022. "Women's Wages and Empowerment : Pre-industrial Japan, 1600-1890," CEI Working Paper Series 2022-05, Center for Economic Institutions, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    6. Kumon, Yuzuru & Sakai, Kazuho, 2022. "Women’s Wages and Empowerment: Pre-industrial Japan, 1600-1890," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 18/2022, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    gender; productivity; discrimination; piece-rates; time-rates; labour markets; firm survival;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing
    • J33 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
    • J40 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - General
    • L25 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Performance

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