Before the Industrial Revolution, it was normal for women to work.20 However, over the course of the Industrial Revolution, female employment fell and labour market disparities between men and women increased.21 By the end of the Industrial Revolution, only one in five women was officially recorded as being part of the workforce.22
As the labour movement gathered strength, working-class men pushed for regulations which restricted the employment of women and children. Areas of labour which were predominantly female, notably domestic service, the largest single category of employment in Victorian Britain and late nineteenth-century United States, failed to attract the interest of trade unionists in the fight for better pay and working conditions.
It was against this backdrop that the ‘male breadwinner model’ was born. Men were now cast in the role of providers and women of caregivers.23 Often considered a historical relic, this model of family life only really came into existence in the nineteenth century, soon becoming the ‘ideal’ template for society. It certainly remained common for young unmarried women to work but it was increasingly uncommon for married women to do so. This ‘cult of domesticity’ not only brought inequalities along gender lines but also along racial‒ethnic lines. As Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei have noted, white middle-class women relied on lowly paid female servants, a high proportion of whom were women of colour or recent immigrants, to take on the drudgery, reserving themselves for the ‘higher level’ aspects of domestic life.24 In 1900, more women worked in domestic service than any other sector, and that included more than 40 per cent of African-American women and European immigrant (such as Irish) labour.25
Whilst women's freedom was central to laying the foundation of the Industrial Revolution, it didn't pay women back for the favour. For men, the Enlightenment and industrialization involved a struggle between man and nature, one in which men came out on top. However, for less privileged groups it was clear that other struggles were taking place, ones created not by nature but by human society.26 Feminists did not take their struggle lying down. Wollstonecraft had made the argument for equal rights in the eighteenth century. A new group of feminists began to push even further, pointing to the drudgery of the domestic sphere. In their 1825 Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, Anna Wheeler and William Thompson wrote that ‘[a]s women's bondage has chained down man to the ignorance and vices of despotism, so will their liberation reward him with knowledge, with freedom and with happiness.’27 By the late nineteenth century, the US feminist movement was gathering force and, in a neat parallel with the Black Death, was helped by the scarcity of male labour during the civil war.28 It was, however, a divided movement, blind to the way in which gender and race intersected in the struggles of the day,29 and with major disagreements between those calling for equal rights and those calling for a ‘maternal’ welfare system ‒ disagreements that persist to this day.30
The Twentieth Century
After retreating in the nineteenth century, women's involvement in the labour market began to expand again in the twentieth century. Claudia Goldin suggests that women's labour force participation has followed a U-shaped trend, initially falling as the economy develops and then recovering thereafter.31 Looking over the longer span of history, as we have done, suggests that this U-shaped process has been repeated, with long cycles of successive Us, as opposed to a single U.
Since it remained common in the nineteenth century for unmarried women to work, the change that came in the twentieth century was significantly less dramatic for this part of the labour force, with the associated labour-force participation rates in the United States rising from around 40‒45% in the early decades of the twentieth century to an average of about 60‒65% for more recent decades. The greatest change was visible for married women, whose labour force participation expanded in an ‘extraordinarily rapid and all-embracing’ way, from 6% in the United States in 1900 to 73% by 2000.32
The increasing prevalence of women in the workforce is often attributed to the feminist movement. However, feminism did not come from nowhere. It developed fastest where economic opportunities for women held firm in the nineteenth century, including my home city of Manchester, famous for the cotton industry and also for the Pankhurst family.33 Feminism subsequently spread at the very same time that a new economic wave began to create opportunities for women. Labour shortages during the two world wars, and the ‘Golden Age’ that followed the second of those, created another period of labour scarcity, giving women and people of colour more bargaining power to push for change.34 And, as the economy advanced and as manufacturing shifted overseas, the West began to move into a new area of activity: services.35 From office work to retail and hospitality, a whole host of new employment opportunities opened up, ones which, unlike heavy industry, did not work to the advantage of men. Economic opportunity, in other words, provided a reason for women to push for change in the political and social sphere. It also, however, created reasons for men to put up barriers, including, for example, marriage bars, especially when there was fierce competition for jobs.36 Whilst men monopolized the better-paid service-sector jobs, women dominated in dead-end clerical jobs and in the types of jobs that had been created in response to a decline in domestic service, such as child and elderly care and food and retail. A similar split could also be found along racial/ethnic lines. The service sector is a story of two halves ‒ and one that continues to the present day.
The Future
Technological development in history has been at the root of rising prosperity, but it has also sometimes brought rising inequality, and not only in terms of income (as at present) but also in terms of gender. However, technology is not necessarily destined to increase inequality between men and women. Having once worked to the advantage of men, we have been passing through a phase in which new technology has been more gender neutral. In the words of Claudia Goldin, technology has led to the ‘replacement of brawn by brain power’.37
In the way that technology eventually replaced muscle power, it is now beginning to replace brain power, something which threatens the livelihoods of both sexes. It is emotional and human skills – skills that are more difficult for a computer to replace – that are set to become the most valuable feature of human beings. The sectors of the economy that are now expanding the fastest are those in which female labour is dominant.38 These sectors have also tended to be those offering the least financial reward, but these very same skills may, due to their increased value, at last receive some of the highest rewards. Furthermore, cyberfeminists argue that the digital age of technology is shaking the boundary between machines and humans, and, with it, the very idea of gender.39 The tables are turning as they did once before, and now, rather than men having the advantage, it is women who will likely be the beneficiaries.
But, if modern technology creates the potential for change, that potential has to be won for it to be achieved. Society does not instantly adapt to changes in technology; where a patriarchal culture holds firm, technologies that are gender neutral can still be dominated by male workers. In fact, not only is feminism needed to push for legal and other changes that allow women to take advantage of opportunities opened up by new technologies, but the way technology develops may in turn reflect the position of women in society. Economists used to assume technology is ‘exogenous’, a force that follows its own path and its own direction, meaning that the resultant effects on gender equality (and income equality) are difficult to resist. However, history has revealed that technology is open to influence ‒ that the direction in which it travels depends on the different resources available.40 We now need to recognize that this direction can similarly be influenced by gender gaps. Whilst technology shapes gender equality and even gender identity itself, gender equality can in return also shape the direction of technology and how that technology is used.41 In the words of Judy Wajcman, ‘technology as such is neither inherently patriarchal nor unambiguously liberating … t
he politics of technology is integral to the renegotiation of gender power relations.’42
Conclusion
Women's struggle in the twentieth century, from the time of the suffragettes onwards, was not just about breaking new ground; it involved regaining lost ground. Industrialization had pushed many women out of the workplace: the male breadwinner model was born. The sidelining of women was crystallized by two accompanying forces: the development of a powerful trade union movement, which represented male interests; and state interventions which, as we will see in chapter 7, rendered women dependent upon spouses. It was also, as we will see in the final part of the book, something which economists encouraged.43
When women are told that they've never had it so good, they are presented with a vision of history in which they are expected to be forever grateful, a vision of history which is supposed to pacify us, leave us unconcerned by what the future holds and, more importantly, off guard. What history really tells us is that we need to be on guard: we can move backwards as well as forwards.
Notes
1 World Economic Forum (2017).
2 Goldin (1990), pp. 59‒63. On the United Kingdom, see Humphries and Weisdorf (2015).
3 World Bank (2011); Duflo (2012).
4 Konner (2015). Also see Dyble et al. (2015).
5 Engels (2010) with an introduction by T. Hunt.
6 Also see Hartmann (1976).
7 Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn (2013).
8 Smuts (1995).
9 Giuliano (2017).
10 Scott (2018).
11 Carmichael, de Pleijt and van Zanden (2016).
12 De Moor and van Zanden (2010). There is some debate about precisely when the change in family structure occurred, with evidence of change either side of the Black Death. See Edwards and Ogilvie (2018).
13 Voigtländer and Voth (2013).
14 Wiesner-Hanks (2015).
15 Ogilvie and Carus (2014), p. 467.
16 Horrell and Humphries (1995).
17 Burnette (2008).
18 Ibid. Also in the United States (Goldin 1990).
19 Wrigley and Schofield (1981).
20 Bowden (1925), pp. 229, 342; Richards (1974): 340, fn. 16; 341, fn. 18.
21 Pinchbek (1930), pp. 306, 375.
22 Richards (1974): 347; Checkland (1964), p. 216.
23 Folbre (1991); Kessler-Harris (2001). On the implications for government policy, Pateman (1988); Pedersen (1995, 2018); Kessler-Harris (2001); Esping-Andersen (2013); Cooke (2011).
24 Amott and Matthaei (1991), esp. pp. 321‒4.
25 Ibid., p. 322.
26 Ibid., pp. 4‒5.
27 Wheeler and Thompson (1825). Quoted in Bryson (2016), p. 28.
28 Perlmann and Margo (2001).
29 Amott and Matthaei (1991); Bryson (2016), pp. 75‒6.
30 Bryson (20016), pp. 82‒91.
31 Goldin (2018).
32 Esping-Andersen (2009); Goldin (2018).
33 Xue (2016) finds greater gender equality today in parts of China in which cotton production developed, offering women great labour market opportunities.
34 Amott and Matthaei (1991), pp. 319‒20.
35 Goldin (1990).
36 Ibid., ch. 6; Amott and Matthaei (1991), pp. 315‒16, 320.
37 Goldin (1990), pp. 4‒5; Goldin and Katz (2008).
38 Fox (2018).
39 Wajcman (2010).
40 Acemoglu (2002).
41 Wajcman (2010).
42 Ibid.: 151.
43 Pujol (1984, 1998); Folbre (1991, 2009).
4
Income Inequality: What Does Sex Have to Do with It?
Over the last decade, not only have we faced the biggest global economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929 – something which, just years before, economists had predicted would never happen again – we have also seen increasing inequality, the stagnation of wages and a slowdown in economic growth. And, as so frequently happens in cases of economic turmoil, political turmoil has followed. The politics of the West are being rewritten.
In this chapter, and after outlining the longer-term trends, we will consider the common explanations for the increase in income inequality. We will go on to note the exclusion of gender from the popular discourse, including in the work of Piketty. I will draw on existing research to identify some of the links between income inequality and gender inequality.1 I will then propose a new diagnosis for the situation we currently find ourselves in: one that places sex front and centre.
Poverty and Income Inequality: The Long Term Trends
Over the course of human history, and as two recent bestselling books have shown, income inequality has not followed a simple trend, whether upwards or downwards.2 Instead, it has followed a wave-like pattern, sometimes rising and at other times falling. Economic history, however, once taught economists to be optimistic. Economic development was assumed to be associated with an initial increase in inequality, but Simon Kuznets argued that this would be temporary; that, with time, inequality would disperse, leading the benefits of economic growth to be spread more widely and more equitably throughout the population.3 It was, in other words, supposed that inequality would follow the path of an upturned U: initially rising and then falling in the course of economic advance. For a while at least, this seemed to ring true. From the 1930s onwards, inequality in the West followed a declining trend. That was until the latter part of the century, when the optimism turned to pessimism. In the 1970s, inequality in many western countries reversed course, reaching levels not seen for decades by the early twenty-first century.4
However, when looking at global income inequality ‒ instead of that within the West ‒ the recent trend is precisely the opposite. Global inequality rocketed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as western countries grew and diverged from the rest of the world, peaking in the 1980s. However, in more recent years it has begun to fall.5 This is, of course, a natural result of other parts of the world starting to ‘catch up’ with the relatively richer West, including the giants that are China and India. Calculating global earnings inequality from 1970 to the present day, Olle Hammar and Daniel Waldenström find that the global Gini coefficient has fallen from a value of around 0.7 in 1970 to less than 0.6 today, and that it was driven not by declining inequality within countries but by falling inequality between countries.6 As Max Roser notes, in the 1970s the global income distribution was bimodal: it had two rather than one peaks. Countries were in two completely different camps, converging either to a high- or a low-income equilibrium. More recently, these twin peaks have disappeared, and the global income distribution has shifted rightwards, meaning that the bulk of the world's population is now positioned at a higher level of income than before.7
Global poverty data also shows reason for optimism. For most of human history – for thousands of years in fact – life was pretty miserable. It was nasty, brutish and short, and you'd have been lucky to live to the ripe old age of forty. The economy was incapable of supporting a rising population. Death rates were high, meaning, as a parent, you would have witnessed the death of multiple children. That would have been the norm. And then, about two hundred years ago, something big happened. The world population began to increase without bound and, despite this rising population, people began to get richer and richer. Global poverty rates have fallen spectacularly alongside (Figure 4.1). Not only is poverty falling in percentage terms, the number of people actually living in extreme poverty is falling. According to the World Bank's estimates, it has more than halved, from around 2.2 billion in 1970 to 705 million by 2015.8
Figure 4.1 Global poverty as percentage of population, 1820‒2013
Source: Bourguignon and Morrisson (2002), pp. 731‒2 to 1970; World Bank from 1981 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY)
However, after the good news comes the bad news. Whilst the aggregate picture looks reasonably positive, not everyone h
as been a beneficiary of this global trend. First, a large part of the decline in global poverty over the last thirty years is due to one region alone: East Asia, including, of course, China. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia remain regions of high poverty. In fact, in these regions the number of people living in extreme poverty has barely budged. That compares strikingly with East Asia and the Pacific, where the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from around 900 million in 1987 to 71 million in 2013.9
Second, although across the world income inequality has declined, in the West it has been on the rise. The top 1% of earners in the United States now takes a fifth of the nation's total earnings. The top 10% of earners takes half the pie. In Europe, the situation is a little better, although not much. In Britain, the top 10% receives 40% of the cake, whilst in France and Germany it is a third. Such figures are also reflected in another measure of inequality: the multiple of earnings of directors compared with the average worker. In the 1990s, the executive pay packet was around sixty times that of the average worker. Now it is closer to two hundred. Alongside, the real incomes of working-class men have stagnated or even fallen. Whereas in 1969, three-quarters of men aged 25 could expect to earn a wage that would independently support a family of four, by 2004 it took until men reached the age of 30 for them to earn enough to do so.10
Branko Milanovic's famous ‘elephant chart’ helps to show what has been going on. It presents the real income gains of different income groups, from the poorest in the world to the richest in the world since 1988, and looks (unsurprisingly) like the cross section of an elephant.11 It shows positive gains for the bottom 75% of the population, along with the top 10%, but for the people in between it's a different story. These are the people feeling the pressure, commonly referred to as the western working class (in global terms, the upper-middle class). Whilst the world is becoming a better place, it is clear that pockets of severe poverty and inequalities still remain.
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