Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T05:31:05.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Gender Gap in Wages

Productivity or Prejudice or Market Power in Pursuit of Profits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

Explanations of the gender pay gap and related labor market segregation remain fiercely debated. On the one side are those economic historians who take a primarily neoclassical view, in which competition among workers and employers eliminates wage differences that do not reflect productivity and occupational segregation that is not the outcome of choice. Persistent discrimination must reflect anticompetitive institutions, for instance, trade unions. A corollary of the neoclassical perspective is that markets are liberating, freeing agents, including women, from cultural stereotypes and ensuring that they get paid what they are worth, although of course this need not imply wage equality if there are gender differences in productivity. On the other side are those cultural historians who interpret wage differences as reflecting custom and, as far as women are concerned, the cultural deprecation of women's work, while occupational segregation represents gender stereotypes of fit work for women. In this view, socially and culturally constructed gender identities can influence market outcomes, producing discrimination in wages and work that persists even in the face of competitive forces.

Type
Special Section: Debating Gender, Work, and Wages: A Roundtable Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2009 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anonymous (1862) “Autobiography of a navvy.” Macmillans Magazine, November 1861–April 1862.Google Scholar
Arnold, William (1915) Recollections of William Arnold. Northampton, MA: privately printed.Google Scholar
Berik, Gunseli, Muelen Rodgers, Yana van der, and Zveglich, Joseph E. (2004) “International trade and gender wage discrimination: Evidence from East Asia.” Review of Development Economics 8: 237–54.Google Scholar
Burnette, Joyce (2008) Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scholliers, Peter (1996) Wages, Manufacturers, and Workers in the Nineteenth-Century Factory: The Voortman Cotton Mill in Ghent. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar