Were women’s wage customary?

The most intriguing opening sentence I have read today:

Throughout history and all over the world women have earned lower wages than men.

It comes from a paper by Joyce Burnette of Wabash College, which she is presenting to her fellow economic historians at Yale later today. Her paper, Were Women’s Wage Customary? (PDF), examines the gap between men and women's wages over the centuries and whether it reflected custom or market forces:

The best way to resolve the question of who was right is to look for evidence that is not the expression of someone’s opinion, but is direct evidence from output. Evidence from production functions gives us such direct evidence. The available evidence from production functions uniformly indicates that women had lower marginal productivity than men.

Using census data to estimate the marginal products of men and women in the US in 1860, Craig and Field-Hendrey find that women were about 60 percent as productive as men in agriculture, and 40 to 50 percent as productive in manufacturing. Cox and Nye use data on nineteenth-century French manufacturing firms to estimate the marginal product of male and female workers and find productivity ratios ranging from 0.37 to 0.63. When they test for wage discrimination, they find no evidence of wage discrimination.

Benjamin and Brandt use a 1936 household survey in China to estimate the contribution of men and women to family income in general and crop income specifically; they find that women contributed 62 percent as much as men to farm production.60 Women are also less productive than men in agriculture in developing countries today; Jacoby finds that women were 46 percent as productive as men in Peruvian agriculture in the 1980s. While the estimates of the productivity ratio vary depending on the industry and location, all of the estimates suggest that women were substantially less productive than men in manual labor.

Thus I conclude that women’s wages, at least in competitive sectors such as agriculture and textile manufacturing, were not customary in the sense that they were lower than women’s productivity.

Provocative stuff, and not something most male economic historians would ever dare argue.

Comments

[knzn]

Isn’t there an identification problem? If custom set men’s wages higher, then it would be uneconomical to hire men for low productivity jobs, and you would still find that women, who do get hired for such jobs, are less productive than men.

[Lafayette]

knzn: "... and you would still find that women, who do get hired for such jobs, are less productive than men."

Not in electronic assembly where thier nimbleness with components is prized. Neither in QC checks where they do not flinch at repetitiveness. But, throwing concrete blocks around a building site? You're right.

It all depends.

[Steven]

Speaking from personal experience of Peru in the 1980's ( and common sense) women in rural communities had more types of work to do than men, ... though they didn't spend much time on "housework" in their mud and stone hut, they spent an awful lot of time on food prep., y'know digging it up, cutting and mashing it, carrying water to boil it in, child care, making/repairing clothes etc. (as they do all over the world today).

Women work longer hours than men and most of their hours of work are still unpaid.

"Provocative stuff, and not something most male economic historians would ever dare argue."

Why not?

Somethings are pretty obvious .. I spent almost all of my 17th year hodding furnace bricks to build industrial ovens. Each brick weighed 8+lbs , the hod held 12 normal bricks but only(!) 10 of these however the brickies norm was for the hoddy to bring and stack bricks by the dozen. So I carried an extra 2 in my left hand.

I sincerely doubt that there were, or are, many women (or economists) who could carry 7.5 bricks in a hod day in and day out for months AND drink 6.5 pints of bitter an evening.

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