Why we shouldn’t measure women’s labour force participation in pre-industrial countries

ABSTRACT

Labour force participation was designed to measure contemporary labour markets, and does a poor job of measuring work, particularly women’s work, in the past. When we measure labour force participation we ignore production for household use, ignore differences in the intensity of work, and assume a continuity of employment that did not characterize most historical work. Therefore, I suggest that we should not use labour force participation to measure women’s work outside of modern, industrialized societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Labor force participation
• women's work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Examining the homes of artisans in north-west England, Barker (2017, 170) concludes that ‘it is likely that around a third to two-thirds of all internal space was given over predominantly or entirely to business use’.

2 Since Jean sold one-third of the farm’s output, one-third of the 253 days, or 84 days, count as for the market. Adding to this the 32 days in transportation and 20 days in marketing, we get 136 days.

3 Author’s calculations from Le Play (1877).

4 Menzel and D’Aluisio (2008) record the value of self-produced food for only seven of the 25 families they interview. Families in rural China, Ecuador, and Guatemala produce less than 10% of the food they consume, while families in Bhutan, Chad, and Greenland produce much more substantial portions of the food they eat.