Women in the Printing Trades: A Sociological Study.

WITH A PREFACE BY PROFESSOR F. Y. EDGEWORTH.
INVESTIGATORS:
MRS. J. L. HAMMOND, MISS A. BLACK, MRS. H. OAKESHOTT, MISS A. HARRISON, MISS IRWIN, and Others.
LONDON: P. S. KING & SON,
ORCHARD HOUSE, WESTMINSTER.
1904.
My only qualification for writing this preface is the circumstance that, as a representative of the Royal Economic Society, I attended the meetings of the Committee appointed to direct and conduct the investigations of which the results are summarised in the following pages. From what I saw and heard at those meetings I received the impression that the evidence here recorded was collected with great diligence and sifted with great care. It seems to constitute a solid contribution to a department of political economy which has perhaps not received as much attention as it deserves.
Among the aspects of women's work on which some new light has been thrown, is the question why women in return for the same or a not very different amount of work should often receive very much less wages. It is a question which not only in its bearing on social life is of the highest practical importance, but also from a more abstract point of view is of considerable theoretical interest, so far as it seems to present the paradox of entrepreneurs paying at very different rates for factors of production which are not so different in efficiency.
The question as stated has some resemblance to the well-known demand for an explanation which Charles II. preferred to the Royal Society: there occurs the preliminary question whether the circumstance to be explained exists. The alleged disproportion between the remuneration of men and women is indeed sometimes only apparent, or at least appears to be greater than it is really. Often, however, it is real and great where it is not apparent.
On the one hand, in many cases in which at first sight women seem to be doing the same work as men for less pay, it is found on careful inquiry, that they are not doing the same work. The same work nominally is not always the same work actually, as the Editor reminds us (Chapter IV. par. 1). Men feeders, for instance, carry formes and do little things about the machine which women do not do. In this and other ways men afford to the employer a greater net advantageousness, as Mr. Sidney Webb puts it in his valuable study on the Alleged Differences in the Wages paid to Men and to Women for similar Work ( Economic Journal , Vol. I. pp. 635 et seq. ). The examples of this phenomenon adduced by Mr. Webb, and in the evidence before the Royal Commission on Labour, are supplemented by these records. To instance one of the less obvious ways in which a difference in net advantageousness makes itself felt, employers say: It does not pay to train women: they would leave us before we got the same return for our trouble as we get from men. At the same time it is to be noticed in many of these cases that though the work of women is less efficient, it is not so inferior as their pay. For instance, a Manchester employer estimated that a woman was two-thirds as valuable in a printer's and stationer's warehouse as a man, and she was paid 15 s. or 20 s. to his 33 s. , (p. 47, note).