Women's Wages

by William Smart

It is not necessary to prove that women's wages are, as a rule, much under those of men. In the textile trades of Great Britain, which constitute the largest department of women's work, the average of women's wages is probably—in Scotland it is certainly—about ten shillings per week. This labour is not by any means unskilled, as anyone who has ever seen a spinning or weaving factory knows. Twenty shillings per week, however, is a low average for a man possessing any degree of skill whatever.

In a paper read before the British Association at Cardiff, Mr. Sidney Webb gave some valuable statistics on the subject. Women workers he divides into four classes—manual labourers, routine mental workers, artistic workers, and intellectual workers. The two latter classes may be dismissed in a word. Sex has little to do in determining the wages of their work. A novelist, a poet, a writer of any sort, is under no disadvantage that she is a woman, while in many departments of artistic work women have an obvious advantage. But in the third class, that of routine mental workers, Mr. Webb finds that women's earnings are invariably less than men's. In the Post Office and Telegraph Departments, in the Savings Banks, and in the Government offices generally, where women do precisely similar work with men, and are sometimes, as in ledger work, acknowledged to do it better, they invariably earn much less. The largest experiment yet made in this direction is that of the Prudential Life Assurance Office, which began in 1872 to substitute women clerks for the lower grades of men clerks. There are now 243 ladies employed in routine clerical work, which they are said to do more efficiently than men. The salaries run thus:—£32 for the first year, £42 for the second, £52 for the third, and £60 on promotion—probably half of what men might be expected to accept. In Glasgow lady typists and shorthand writers are offering their services from 9.30 till 5, with one hour for dinner, for £25. In the teaching profession women almost invariably receive lower remuneration than men. The Education Department Report of 1888-90 gives the average wage of teachers throughout England and Wales as £119 for men and £75 for women. Similarly low salaries are found under the London School Board, in the Secondary Schools, and in girls' schools generally as compared with boys' schools.

The exception noted by Mr. Webb is interesting and, I think, suggestive. In the United States, where women teachers often alternate with men in the same school, the salaries of women are habitually lower. But in the State of Wyoming, where women have a vote, the salaries are equal.

Coming now to the manual workers, Mr. Webb takes the statistics furnished by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labour in 1884. These give the average of 17,430 employés in 110 establishments in Great Britain, and 35,902 employés in 210 establishments in Massachusetts, representing in both cases 24 different manufacturing industries. The women's wages show a proportion of one-third to two-thirds the amount earned by men, the nearest approach to equality being in textiles—cotton goods, hosiery, and carpetings in Great Britain, woollen and worsted goods in Massachusetts. Without going further into statistics, I think we may assume the fact of a great disparity between men's and women's wages, and go on to ask the reason of it.

If we put the question in general terms, Why is a woman's wage less than that of a man? there are some answers that spring to the lips of everyone. First, it is said that it is a mere question of supply and demand. Second, that women are not usually the sole bread-winners in the family to which they belong. Third, that their standard of living is lower than that of men. Fourth, that their work is not so good as that of men. Fifth, that the commodities made by women have, generally, a less value in the market. There is truth in all these answers, but I propose to show that each of them is at best a half truth, raising as many questions as it settles.

The first answer given is that women's wages are low because of the equation of supply and demand. Only certain branches of industry are open to women. In these there is a great number of women competing for employment. They are free to take work or refuse it. But over the industrial community there are found enough women willing to take the low wage which employers find they can offer, and free competition determines the level. If two women run after one employer, wages will fall; if two employers run after one woman, wages will rise.

Those who think this answer an easy and satisfactory one must be unaware of the unsettling of many problems since Mill's day. Mill had no less than three laws of value—that of the Equation of Supply and Demand, that of Cost of Production, and that of Differential Cost of Production. The former law, he said, applied to goods of which the quantity was naturally, or artificially, or temporarily, limited, and it was, besides, the sole determinant of the value of labour. But then Mill was assuming a definite Wage Fund—a fixed portion of the circulating capital of the country predestined for the payment of wages. This definite sum, and no more, was to employ all the workers, however many they might be. If, then, wages fell, the reason was obvious—there were too many workers. Wherever Mill touches on low wages we have a sermon on the evils of over-population, and his favourite explanation did not fail him here. "Where employers take full advantage of competition, the low wages of women are a proof that the employments are overstocked." But this is logical only if "overstocking" is the sole possible cause of low wages—which might be doubted even under a Wage Fund theory. But the Wage Fund is now one of the antiquities of political economy. Since Jevons we have looked for the measure of value in marginal utility; for the value of productive goods in their marginal utility as instruments of production; and for the value of labour in the value of its products, and not in any predetermined fund divided out among a variable number of workers by the action of supply and demand. And where invention is constantly widening and strengthening our power over natural resources and increasing the productiveness of labour, the presumption is against the idea that over-population is even a strong factor in modern wages.

There is, indeed, no formula in political economy on which the modern economist looks with more suspicion than that of Supply and Demand. The operation of supply and demand as determining market price is, of course, perfectly definite; but to say that any concrete price is fixed by the equation of supply and demand is a mere statement of an observed fact which says little, unless one knows and defines accurately what is involved in the "supply," what is involved in the "demand," and how those two factors stand related to each other. The price of railway stock to-day is determined by supply and demand; the price of a man's labour, whether unattached or working under restriction of the Trade Union, is determined by supply and demand; the earnings of the poor soul who sells her body on the streets are determined by supply and demand. What does this formula tell us unless we know the complex phenomena which determine the supply of railways and the demand for transit, the supply of labourers and the demand for work, the supply of hapless women and the demand for human souls? To say, then, that women's wages are low because there are enough women who take the low wage, is little more than to say that wages are low because people are paid low wages. We have still to ask: What are the factors, or influences, or motives, that make women take a wage below that of men, and what are the factors that make employers offer the low wage?

Apart from the general insufficiency of this first answer, it is enough to remember that the determination of wage by this mechanical equation of supply and demand could be tolerable only under absolutely free competition, which would involve perfect mobility of labour. But labour has this unique characteristic among all commodities that, physically, it is not mobile; historically, it has never been mobile; and ethically, it should not be mobile. A man's labour is—and should be—his life, not the mere instrument of providing a living; and, therefore, in the question of wages it is impossible to ignore the ethical consideration. Civilised society could not hold together if the workman and workwoman could only get their fair share of the world's boundless wealth by changing their trade, their residence, or their country, as a higher wage offered itself.

The second reason given is that, women not being as a rule the sole bread-winners of the family, their wage is auxiliary to that of its head; the woman's wage is, as it were, "found" money in the household purse. Underlying this statement is an assumption which is at least questionable. It is that the economic or wage-earning unit is the family. This is an old-time idea which, however beautiful and desirable, is a little out of place in the conditions to which the factory system has brought us. Once-a-day it was recognised that children had a far greater claim on the persons who brought them into the world than we now allow. It was thought that the one wage should be earned by the head of the house, and should be large enough to maintain the wife and daughters without outside work, and to educate and apprentice the sons till they were able to hive off for themselves. Any money earned by the junior members of the family was, in this case, supplementary, and determined by a different law. Perhaps in time we may come back to this view. Mr. Frederic Harrison is sanguine that we shall. But meantime the factory system has changed all that, and it is scarcely worth while looking for laws of wage in a condition of family life which does not now obtain. Putting aside the objections that many married women are not members of a family, and that many married women and widows are the sole bread-winners of the family, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that this answer would not be taken as explaining or justifying a low wage among what we call the "better classes." It would not be counted an excuse or reason for a publisher asking a lady novelist to accept a lower price for her books, or for a patient offering a lower fee to a lady doctor. If the sex of the author, artist, musician, doctor, intellectual or artistic worker generally, has nothing to do with her remuneration, why should sex determine the wage of the factory girl?