Gender Gaps in Wages and Mortality Rates During Industrialization: The Case of Alcoy, Spain, 1860–1914

Abstract

What role did women play during industrialization? Interpretations of this key period of history have been largely based on analyses of men’s work. This paper offers evidence of the effects of women’s involvement in the industrialization process that took place in Alcoy, Spain, over the period 1860–1914. Using data drawn from historical sources, the study analyzes labor force participation rates and wage series for women and men in the textile industry and three other sectors of activity (education, health, and low-skill services). The paper then connects the gender pay gaps with life expectancy indicators. Results suggest that women’s contribution to household income might have favored the female life-expectancy advantage, an effect that seems to have been channeled through a reduction in the relative mortality rates of female infants and girls, at the expense of a higher mortality rate of working-age women.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Analyzing women’s early labor market participation helps interpret current trends in women’s wages and life conditions.

• Gender wage gaps in 1860–1914 in Alcoy, Spain are representative of women’s earnings during industrialization.

• The research connects women’s earnings with gender differentials in life expectancy.

• Mortality rates of girls and elderly women decreased as compared to men’s rates.

• The opposite occurred to working-age women, who were exposed to poor working conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Industrialization
• gender wage gap
• women’s mortality advantage
• Spain

JEL Codes:

• J16
• J31
• O14

Notes

1 Dr. José Joaquín García-Gómez is the corresponding author for this article.

2 The “Report of the Farmers Guild,” 1883, explicitly stated that “due to the limitation of our farming land, it is not traditional among our workers’ wives to devote themselves to agricultural tasks.” Also, the population censuses in the city pointed out that the vast majority of workers were occupied in the industrial sector, with agriculture occupying a very small share of the labor force.

3 Initially, the smaller and skillful female hands were considered particularly suitable for some tasks as weaving, yarn, or textile-finishing, as well as for the management of the spinning jenny (whose introduction was one of the key developments in the earlier industrialization of weaving). As long as the industry was evolving, new machines were introduced which tend to be heavier and harder to manage, which then become a source of tasks almost exclusively undertaken by men.

4 We display at the bottom of Table 5 the Dickey-Fuller tests of unit root applied to the gender wage gap series; the results allow us to rule out concerns of non-stationarity at conventional levels of significance.

5 We use the two-fold decomposition, common in the literature, which expresses the outcome (wages) differences assuming that there is some nondiscriminatory coefficients vector β* that serves as reference to determine the contribution of the differences in the explanatory variables. The wage differential is, in this case, W_m – W_f = (X_m – X_f) β* + [ X_m (β_m – β*) + X_f (β* – β_f)] with subscript f referring to women and m to men. The reference coefficients vector β* is estimated as the coefficients from a pooled model over both groups. As regards the identification issue of detailed coefficients for dummy variables in Oaxaca decompositions, the estimation provided in Table 6 incorporates the correction proposed by Myeong-Su Yun (2005), which makes the results to be independent of the choice of the omitted category.

6 We checked for robustness with three- and four-year moving averages; results do not appreciably change.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universidad de Almería [Plan propio de investigación 2018. Estancia en la]; Secretaria de Estado de Investigacion Desarrollo e Innovacion: [grant number ECO2017-86793-R,PGC2018-097817-B-C32]. Generalitat Valenciana, PROMETEO 2019–95.

Notes on contributors

Pilar Beneito

Pilar Beneito holds an MSc in Economics from University College London and a doctoral degree in Economics from University of Valencia (Spain), and her lines of research are mainly applied industrial economics and gender economics.

José J. Garcia-Gómez

José J. Garcia-Gómez holds a doctoral degree in Economics from University of Alicante (Spain), and he has published several economic history papers, with special focus on the process of Industrialization in Spain.