Two Worlds of Female Labour. Gender Wage Inequality in Western Europe, 1300-1800 - Alexandra de Pleijt & Jan L. Van Zanden (ANOTADA)

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Two worlds of female labour: gender wage inequality in western Europe, 1300–
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Article in The Economic History Review · January 2021

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Economic History Review, 74, 3 (2021), pp. 611–638
Two worlds of female labour: gender

wage inequality in western
†
Europe,
1300–1800
By ALEXANDRA DE PLEIJT and JAN LUITEN VAN ZANDEN∗
Labour market engagement by women is an important determinant of female

autonomy that may also affect their demographic behaviour. In order to bring about
the conditions for the female autonomy that characterized the European marriage
pattern (in which women had a say in the decision about when and whom they marry),
women needed to earn a decent wage. This is clearly affected by the gender wage
ratio and the possibility of women earning their own living and having the option of
remaining single. So far no attempt has been made to compare the wages of women
across Europe over the long run. In this article we provide evidence on the wages
of unskilled women for seven European countries (represented by cities or regions
within these countries) between 1300 and 1800. Our evidence shows that there were
two worlds of female labour. In the south of Europe women earned about 50 per
cent of the wage of unskilled male labourers, a ratio that seems to have been fixed
by custom. In the northern and western parts of Europe this ratio was much higher
during late medieval period, but it showed a declining trend between about 1500 and
1800, a change that was caused by market forces.
T he ‘little divergence’ or ‘reversal of fortunes’ is the process whereby the North

Sea region, notably England and the Low Countries, developed into the most
prosperous and dynamic part of the Continent. In all European countries real wages
went up after the Black Death (1347–8). On the Continent real wages went back to
pre-plague levels in the long run, thereby confirming Malthusian expectations. In
the North Sea region, however, real wages remained relatively high.1 This pattern
is also clear from more recent evidence on per capita GDP, which shows that there
was almost continuous growth in the Low Countries and England, whereas levels
of per capita GDP stagnated in the rest of Europe.2
∗ Authors’ Affiliation: Utrecht University.

†
We thank Jean-Pascal Bassino, Joerg Baten, Joyce Burnette, Greg Clark, Giovanni Federico, Jane Humphries,
Bas van Leeuwen, Alessandro Nuvolari, Sevket Pamuk, Kevin O’Rourke, Mats Olssen, Jaime Reis, Jacob Weisdorf,
and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are especially grateful to Guido
Alfani, Enrique Llopis Angelan, and Ernesto López Losa for sharing their data with us, and to Marta Montebovi
and Rex Hardeman for data collection. We also thank the seminar, conference, and workshop participants at the
2017 European Historical Economics Society Conference, the 8th World Congress of Cliometrics, the EINITE
conference on inequality at the University of Bocconi, the XVIII World Economic History Conference, and the
International Institute for Social History for useful feedback. Alexandra de Pleijt has benefited from funding made
available by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), project number 446-16-014.
1 Allen, ‘Great divergence in European wages’; idem, British industrial revolution.
2 For example, Broadberry, Campbell, Klein, Overton, and van Leeuwen, British economic growth; van Zanden
and van Leeuwen, ‘Persistent but not consistent’; Bolt and van Zanden, ‘Maddison Project’; Fouquet and
© 2020 The Authors. The Economic History Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Economic History Society.
This is an open access article under the terms of the CreativeCommonsAttribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
612 ALEXANDRA DE PLEIJT AND JAN LUITEN VAN ZANDEN
One of the possible explanations for this divergent path of economic growth
in the North Sea region is the European marriage pattern (hereafter EMP); that
is, in this particular region of the world women married relatively late, and there
was a small spousal age gap and a high share of single women.3 Labour market
engagement by women plays a role in the explanation of the EMP.4 The degree
to which women participate in labour markets and how they are remunerated are
important determinants of female autonomy that may also affect their demographic
behaviour. It has been argued that labour market engagement limited fertility
and increased human capital formation, eventually causing the shift to modern
economic growth.5
The link between fertility, human capital formation, and economic growth has
also been stressed by unified growth theory.6 Unified growth theory postulates
a preference switch at the household level from large numbers of ‘low quality’
children to small numbers of ‘high quality’ children.7 The decrease in fertility
rates and the increase in the level of human capital triggers the transition from
‘Malthusian stagnation’ to ‘modern economic growth’.
The relative and absolute remuneration of the work carried out by women
obviously played a large role in determining the options women had in the EMP. No
doubt, their opportunities for participating in labour markets were in general not
comparable to those of men, who dominated the higher segments of that market,
but—as Hajnal’s interpretation of the EMP stresses—women were active in pre-
industrial labour markets, which is confirmed by a large body of more qualitative
evidence.8 Moreover, a share of western European households were headed by
single women, implying that they must have been able to acquire an income. The
gender wage ratio—that is, the wage earned by women as a percentage of that
of men—obviously played a large role in determining the agency of women in
this respect. So far several authors have documented women’s wages in different
times and places (see section I for an overview),9 but Humphries and Weisdorf
were the first to attempt to match Clark’s evidence on the long-run evolution
of male wages with comparable series for women workers in England.10 More
specifically, Humphries and Weisdorf presented two wage series for unskilled
English workers between 1260 and 1850, one based on daily wages and one on the
daily remuneration implied in annual contracts. Their findings show that women
working on annual contracts did not share in the post-plague ‘golden age’; only
women working for day wages saw their income increase after this ‘shock’. From
this, Humphries and Weisdorf have concluded that there is insufficient support for
a ‘girl-powered’ economic breakthrough.11
Broadberry, ‘Seven centuries’; de Pleijt and van Zanden, ‘Accounting’; Allen, ‘Progress and poverty’; van Zandn,
Long road.
3 Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns’.
4 de Moor and van Zanden, ‘Girl power’.
5 Voth and Voigtländer, ‘Fertility restriction’; Baten, Szoltysek, and Camprestrini, ‘“Girl power” in eastern
Europe?’; Diebolt and Perrin, ‘From stagnation to sustained growth’.
6 Galor and Weil, ‘Gender gap’; eisdem, ‘Population’; Galor, Unified growth theory.
7 Becker, Treatise on the family.
8 For example, Ogilvie, ‘Women and labour markets’.
9 For example, van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Market wage or discrimination?’; van Zanden, ‘Malthusian
intermezzo’; Burnette, Gender, work and wages.
10 Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’; Clark, ‘Long march of history’.
11 Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’.
© 2020 The Authors. The Economic History Review published by John Wiley & Sons Economic History Review, 74, 3 (2021)
Ltd on behalf of Economic History Society.
GENDER WAGE INEQUALITY IN WESTERN EUROPE 613
In this article we study these issues from a broader European perspective,
supplementing Humphries and Weisdorf ’s wage series for women’s day wages
with evidence on women’s day wages for a set of European cities and regions
over the long run. Following Allen, the series of wages of unskilled female
workers has been derived from key publications of sources of wages and prices.12
This gives us evidence for Flanders (Antwerp),13 Spain (Aragon, Navarra, and
Seville),14 Germany (Augsburg and Wurzburg),15 Sweden (Stockholm),16 and
Austria (Weyer).17 To obtain more insight into the evolution of the English gender
wage ratio, we also used a dataset on wages set by Justices of the Peace.18 The latter
dataset is the only one that concerns not the actual wages paid out to men and
women, but a kind of normative wage setting, originally focused on the maximum
wage that could be paid to labourers and craftsmen, as a response to the labour
shortages after 1348. All other wages used here relate to amounts of money paid
to those men and women, as they are mentioned in historical sources (often the
accounts of institutions or government agencies).
As with many comparisons in (economic) history and the social sciences in
general, it is not easy to compare like with like. While contemporary data make
it possible to study the gender wage ratio of the entire female labour force versus
the male labour force, one limitation of this study is that the scarcity of data for
pre-modern societies makes it impossible to do the same. We focus on the daily
wages of mostly unskilled male and female labourers, and try to establish how
large the gap between men and women is in various cities and regions in the period
between about 1400 and 1800. The contribution of the different structures of the
male and female labour forces on their relative wages—an important additional
dimension of discrimination—is therefore not taken into account, which means
that the average gender wage ratio is biased to some degree. Our gender wage ratio
therefore cannot be compared with contemporary estimates of the ratio, as it only
covers one dimension—unequal pay for similar jobs.
The proposed comparison of daily wages of unskilled male and female labourers
has other limitations as well. We tried as much as possible to compare similar male
and female occupations and wages, in an attempt to measure the ‘pure’ gender
wage ratio of unskilled workers; in a way this is the most basic gender wage ratio.
However, as the overview of the wages we collected shows, different jobs were
available in different regions—there was no grape harvesting work in Sweden, and
we found almost no women employed in the building industry in Italy. Some
agricultural wages relate to harvest work, and others to employment throughout
the year. Such are the limitations of comparative economic historical research.
However, since we focus on the wage ratio between men and women, we can assume
that the bonus for temporary labour scarcity, which is probably included in harvest
wages, affects both and therefore has a minor effect on the ratio between them. As
so often in this kind of research, the availability of sources to a large extent dictated
12 Allen, ‘Great divergence in European wages’.

13 Verlinden, Documenten.
14 Hamilton, Money, prices and wages; Palacios, Fluctuaciones económica.
15 Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte.
16 Jansson, Palm, and Söderberg, Dagligt bröd.
17 Pribram, Materialien zur Geschichte.
18 See Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes’; van Zanden, ‘Malthusian intermezzo’.
the wages that could be studied. By comparing, as much as possible, like with like
(that is, comparable unskilled work, derived from the same source, concerning the
same location) we deal with potential compositional effects as best we can. Our
analysis of evidence from the wage assessments issued by English Justices of the
Peace are intended to address this issue empirically. Our regressions demonstrate
that the gender wage ratio did not differ substantially among different roles (reapers
and haymakers) and the trends over time are very similar even after controlling for
region. Although tentative, these results indicate that it is possible to make these
comparisons.
Deriving the evidence for unskilled female wages for a set of European countries
allows us to study the trends in the gender wage ratio across countries and over time.
The pattern that emerges from this is that the gender wage ratio was relatively low
in southern Europe: in Italy, Spain, and probably also southern France, the ratio
was about 50 per cent in the centuries after the Black Death. In the North Sea
region in the same period (in England and Flanders, but also in sixteenth-century
Sweden) the daily wages of unskilled women were much higher, as much as 80 to
90 per cent—and sometimes 100 per cent—of those of men. Interestingly, when
men and women worked in teams and did the same job, they often got paid the
same wage (or only a slightly lower wage).19
A second important finding is the decline in the gender wage ratio in north-
western Europe over the course of the early modern period. Whereas the wages
of women had been relatively high after the Black Death until the early sixteenth
century, the gender wage ratio decreased rapidly afterwards, and in England and
Sweden in the eighteenth century, for example, women earned less than half the
wage of men—less than in Italy and Spain (or Germany). We hypothesize that slack
labour markets help to explain the decreases in the relative wages of women. Periods
of economic growth saw an increasing wage ratio, as occurred in Antwerp in the
sixteenth century, Sweden in the early seventeenth century, and England between
1650 and 1750; while periods of declining real wages for men—for example,
England in the sixteenth century—often also witnessed a decline in the gender
wage ratio. The implication of this finding is that women seem to have suffered
more than men in times of economic hardship, a point also made by Langdon and
Mate.20
It is a challenge to distinguish changes in trends from short-term fluctuations
caused, for example, by changes in the composition of the labour force, or by
exogenous shocks such as the Black Death of 1348. We therefore perform a simple
regression analysis to identify ‘significant’ deviations from the ratio observed in the
base period. It demonstrates that the long-term swings in the gender wage ratio
in north-western Europe are clearly a different pattern to the persistent stability
we observe in the Mediterranean region, where movements from year to year were
limited, and there was a strong tendency to move back to the previous level after a
shock had been absorbed.
Third, we estimate how many days of work were needed for women to earn the
‘bare-bones’ basket (that is, the minimum subsistence package for one person).21
19 Penn, ‘Female wage-earners’.

20 Langdon, ‘Women and workers’; Mate, Daughters, wives and widows.
21 Allen, ‘Great divergence in European wages’; Allen and Weisdorf, ‘Industrious revolution’.
It should be mentioned here that young single women were not always allowed to
work in the casual labour market. In medieval England there were legal constraints
on young single women working casually and it remained strongly discouraged into
the sixteenth century.22 However, when these women were allowed to work casually,
the number of days gives an indication of whether they were able to generate
enough income to maintain a single household. In contexts where there were legal
constraints on single women working casually, such as in medieval England, the
number of days gives us a useful indication of how much married women could
add to the family income. The picture that emerges from this is that there was a
‘golden age of labour’ in western Europe. In the countries bordering the North Sea
c. 75 days of work were required for the bare-bones basket before the Black Death,
whereas this had declined to c. 25 to 40 days of work in the first half of the fifteenth
century. After 1500, when the population level climbed back to pre-plague levels,
there was a tendency to increase again. These numbers suggest, however, that it
was possible for a woman with access to the casual labour market and sufficient
employment opportunities to earn an income that allowed her to remain single.
We also briefly address the debate about the possible drivers of the gender
wage ratio. Is the lower remuneration for (unskilled) work the result of social
norms—of discrimination in the workplace—or is it related to the supposedly
lower productivity of women and caused by market forces that value productivity
differences? Burnette has made a strong case for the second interpretation,
suggesting that women had less strength, worked fewer hours, and were less
skilled,23 but others have argued that social norms and social capital played a large
role in determining the relative pay of women.24 Given the nature of our data, we
can only touch upon this discussion briefly, however.25
I. Data on female wages

Historians have documented women’s work and women’s wages to determine their
relative position in the labour market and their (relative) earnings.26 The main
finding of this strand of the literature is that women’s wages usually equalled
between one-third and two-thirds of wages paid to men in the early modern period.
However, it is difficult to find general patterns in this vast literature because of the
absence of a clear methodology for comparing the relative wages of women across
time and space.
Medievalists have moreover debated whether working women enjoyed a ‘golden
age’ in the later middle ages. Goldberg and Barron have suggested that labour
23 Burnette, ‘Investigation’.
24 de Groot, Fabricage van Verschillen. See the discussion in Ogilvie, Bitter living; eadem, ‘Women and labour
markets’.
25 Please also note that the drivers of the wage ratio may differ over time and between places.
26 See Berg, ‘Difference’; Brik, ‘Wages’; Burnette, ‘Investigation’; eadem, Gender, work and wages; eadem, ‘Wages
and employment’; Clark, Working life of women; de Groot, Fabricage van Verschillen; Field, ‘Domestic service’; Field
and Erickson, ‘Prospects and preliminary work’; Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation’;
Humphries and Schneider, ‘Spinning the industrial revolution’; Kussmaul, Servants in husbandry; van Nederveen
Meerkerk, ‘Market wage or discrimination?’; eadem, ‘De draad in eigen handen’; Ogilvie, Bitter living; Pinchbeck,
Women workers; Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering’; Sarasua, ‘Women’s work and structural
change’; Sharpe, Adapting to capitalism; Simonton, History; Snell, Annals of the labouring poor; Valenze, First
industrial woman; van Zanden, ‘Malthusian intermezzo’; Whittle, ‘Servants in rural England’.
scarcity after the Black Death allowed women to find employment in jobs that
had earlier been reserved for men.27 Bennett and Mate, however, argued that the
sexual division of labour prevented them: women continued to work in low-skilled
and low-paid occupations.28 Focusing on the demesne accounts of Ebury manor
and the records of prosecutions for breaches of the Statutes of Labourers in the East
Riding of Yorkshire, Bardsley showed that after the Black Death women working on
farms did not earn daily wages that were equal to those paid to men.29 However,
Hatcher pointed out that, according to the evidence of piece-rate payments for
agricultural tasks, male and female workers received the same pay for the same
amount of work.30
Humphries and Weisdorf combined the existing data on the earnings of women
with primary source material to estimate long-run wage series for unskilled English
women workers.31 On the basis of the new evidence, they concluded that women
did not share in the post-plague ‘golden age’. However, so far no attempt has
been made to compare the English wage series with earnings of women in other
European countries over the long run. The classic paper by Allen documents the
evolution in real earnings of men in nine leading European cities from the middle
ages up to the First World War.32 Allen’s focus here was on the building industry: an
important sector in pre-industrial Europe, of which the earnings were relatively well
documented in the records and subsequently summarized in the various volumes
of ‘histories of prices and wages’. However, usually about 90 to 95 per cent of the
data in these sources refer to the earnings of men. In this section we show that there
are female wage data available, but, as we will explain later, for these we sometimes
need to move beyond the construction industry. In other cases we also need to
broaden the geographical scope of the analysis. For instance, the studies of wages
and prices in northern Italy and Spain used by Allen did not contain data on the
wages of women, because they did not show up in the sources used. We therefore
made an extra effort to collect wage data for Italy and Spain. In addition, it can be
argued that the absence or presence of female wages in the historical sources is an
interesting phenomenon in itself. It may actually tell us whether or not women had
access to ‘modern’ labour markets, which was a pre-condition for the development
of the female autonomy that characterized the EMP.33
The strategy we followed was to create a dataset that would supplement the
earlier work of Humphries and Weisdorf for England and that would be comparable
to Allen’s dataset for western Europe between 1300 and 1800.34 The original aim
was to collect comparable wage data for women in southern Europe (Italy and
Spain), central Europe (Germany, Austria), and north-western Europe (the Low
Countries and Sweden), also incorporating the data on England in the comparison.
We excluded France, Sweden, and Austria because other researchers are currently
27 Goldberg, ‘Female labour’; idem, Women, work and life cycle; Barron, ‘“Golden age”’.
28 Bennett, ‘“History that stands still”’; eadem, Ale, beer and brewsters; Mate, Daughters, wives and widows.
29 Bardsley, ‘Women’s work reconsidered’.
30 Hatcher, ‘Women’s work reconsidered’. See also Bardsley, ‘Reply’; Rigby, ‘Gendering the Black Death’;
Langdon, ‘Minimum wages’. For the status of women and the extent to which labour scarcity could override
patriarchal social norms in medieval England, see Bennett, ‘Compulsory service’.
32 Allen, ‘Great divergence of European wages’.
33 de Moor and van Zanden, ‘Girl power’.
34 Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’; Allen, ‘Great divergence in European wages’.
actively gathering evidence on those countries.35 Studying the gender wage ratio
has recently taken off, and we try to offer a first European synthesis of the results.
The data for the remaining countries are available in different formats (see table 1
for an overview). The most detailed data consist of tables containing the wages
found in the sources and the number of observations per wage for a given year.
For example, the data published by Elsas on the ‘Taglöhne für Frauenarbeid’ in
Wurzburg indicate that in 1429, the first year, 86 women earned a daily wage of 7
den and that 178 women earned 8 den. In 1430 the distribution was 43 earning
7 den, 1 earning 8 den, 11 earning 9 den, and finally 4 earning 10 den.36 The
presentation of the entire wage distribution makes it possible to estimate the mean,
the mode, and the median. Most economic historians have focused on the mode—
the ‘normal wage’—as the proxy of the wage level, but other measures are obviously
relevant as well. However, only the source publications by Verlinden on Flanders
and Elsas on Germany give this degree of detail.
The second format consists of economic history studies that present tables of
the wage level of the men and women involved, without specifying if this was the
only wage that was mentioned in the source, and/or if this concerns the mean or
the mode. These studies still make it possible to estimate the female wage ratio
by comparing the published wages of women and men, but we lack the detailed
information about the entire wage distribution that is available for Germany and
Antwerp, where we can compare the female wage ratio based on the average,
the median, and the modal wage. Nevertheless, since we expect that men—even
unskilled men—are over-represented in the upper wage classes, it may well be that
the gender wage ratio based on average wages paid to unskilled workers is higher
than the gender wage ratio based on the modal wage. For Germany and Antwerp
we will test this hypothesis by estimating the gender wage ratio based on the mean
and the mode for Antwerp, Wurzburg, and Augsburg over the long run.
The next issue concerns the kind of work women did, and how comparable this
was to the work performed by men. The literature on male wages focuses almost
entirely on unskilled and skilled workers in the building industry, but for a number
of countries such data for women are not available, perhaps because men more or
less monopolized construction work. In Sweden, England, the Low Countries, and
northern Spain, we do find women active in construction. The data for the other
countries are based on agricultural work, and we compared female wages with male
wages in agriculture. Often they worked together during the harvest, ‘producing’
data for various jobs in the harvesting of grains (as in Augsburg) or grapes (in
Naples), but in other cases it concerned unskilled agricultural labour in general
(as in Piedmont and Flanders). In all cases, we made sure that the wages for the
unskilled labour of women was compared to similar wages for men.
The more general issue here is how comparable the wage work carried out by
men is with that done by women. To ensure a high degree of comparability, we
focused in all cases on the wages of unskilled workers, but that does not necessarily
mean that the kind of work they did was exactly the same. We now turn to a review
of the evidence by country (where we also address this issue).
35 For Sweden and Austria (Vienna), see Gary, ‘Constructing equality?’, and Adelsberger, ‘Occupational wage
differentials’. Both studies are still works in progress.
36 Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte, vol. I.
Table 1. Overview of data used

Wage sampling
Coverage City/region Type of work Source type methodology
England 1260–1850 Rural England Rural labour (harvest Heterogeneous Averages per
work and London sources decade
wages excluded):
various unskilled
female and male
occupations
1550–1760 Rural England Agriculture, harvest Wage settings Point estimates
work: haymaking and for various
reaping English
counties
Belgium 1427–1797 Antwerp Agriculture, harvest Hospital accounts Wage
work: weeding, distributions
harvesting hops,
binding, and
haymaking
Spain 1284–1449 Navarra Construction: various Account books and Average/normal
unskilled female and financial records wages
male occupations in public, private,
and ecclesiastical
archives
1276–1492 Aragon Construction: various Account books and Average/normal
unskilled female and financial records wages
male occupations in public, private,
and ecclesiastical
archives
1687–1739 Seville Laundresses and Poor relief Average/normal
unskilled male institutions wages
labourers
Germany 1432–1755 Augsburg Agriculture, harvest Hospital accounts Wage
work: recher (raking) distributions
and schnitter
(mowing)
1429–1759 Wurzburg Agriculture, harvest City accounts Wage
work: various distributions
unskilled female and
male occupations
Italy 1571–1787 Piedmont Agricultural work, Accounts of estate Average/normal
harvest work: various wages
male occupations
Agriculture, harvest
1734–1806 Naples work: transporters of Accounts of estate Average/normal
baskets of grapes and wages
grape harvesters
Sweden 1600–1720 Stockholm Construction: kvinnliga City accounts Average/normal
hantlangere and wages
hantlangere (female
and male helpers)
Austria 1626–1790 Weyer Weiber-Tagwerk (female City accounts Average/normal
day work): various wages
male occupations
Sources: Rural England: Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’; Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes’. Belgium (Antwerp):
Verlinden, Documenten (1959, 1965). Spain (Navarra, Aragon, and Seville): Hamilton, Money, prices and wages; Palacios,
Fluctuaciones económica; López Losa (personal communication; see n. 40). Germany (Augsburg and Wurzburg): Elsas, Umriss einer
Geschichte, vols. I and II. Italy (Piedmont and Naples): Doria, Uomini e terre; Romano, Prezzi, salari e servizi. Sweden (Stockholm):
Jansson et al., Dagligt bröd. Austria (Weyer): Pribram, Materialien zur Geschichte.
To start with, for Sweden, Jansson et al. focused on women as helpers in the
building industry, and we compare these with male helpers in the same industry
(‘hantlangare’); at other points they are both referred to as ‘male and female
helpers’, indicating the similarity of the work they did.37 That the work is quite
similar is confirmed by the fact that during certain periods the wage ratio was 100
per cent.
For Spain in the late medieval period there are sufficient data for women’s
wages.38 The Spanish data for the late middle ages relate to construction workers.
Hamilton published wages from Aragon and Navarra between 1284 and 1450,
including of ‘laborer, female (mujer)’ and ‘laborer, male (peon or bracero)’, who were
all active in the building industry.39 Similar wages of male and female construction
workers in Zaragoza between 1276 and 1492 are available in the work of Palacios.40
However, for the period after 1500 (and for the south of Spain) such data are
much more scarce, and do not concern construction workers anymore. López Losa
collected the unpublished wage data from the Hamilton archives, which contain
observations of the daily wages of laundresses and unskilled male labourers in
Seville between 1687 and 1708. There are also wages for Madrid available between
1680 and 1800 and for Toledo between 1550 and 1650, but they are annual wages,
which we do not use in this article.41
For Italy there are two series available. The longest series (1571–1787), from
Doria’s study of the village of Montaldeo in the Apennines in Piedmont, concerns
‘salario giornaliero lavori campagna: donna’ (‘daily wage for agricultural work:
woman’) and the same description for ‘uomo’ (‘man’), and relates to general
agricultural work. Doria gives data for almost every month.42 We select the summer
wages (paid in April to September), but the winter wages show identical patterns.
There are similar data on the wages of female and male harvest workers near
Naples between 1734 and 1806.43 In this case the men were the harvesters (of
the grapes), whereas the women transported the baskets of grapes. The work is not
fully identical, but both occupations can be classified as unskilled, and are from the
same source, and for the same place.
For Flanders we concentrate on agricultural labourers employed by the
Antwerp ‘St. Elisabeths Gasthuis’, who are ‘weeding, harvesting hops, binding
and haymaking’, compared with the male workers who are ‘agricultural workers
and gardeners, not specified’.44 The female wages are rather diverse—weeding is
probably not paid as well as haymaking—but the authors decided to group all
female day wages together. However, for Antwerp we can study the average and
mode, which makes these data more valuable.
For Germany there is a classic source—Elsas’s compilation of wages and prices—
from which we are able to collect daily wages of women and men doing harvest
37 Jansson et al., Dagligt bröd.

38 See also for Barcelona Fynn-Paul, ‘Medieval (urban) workyear’.
39 Hamilton, Money, prices and wages.
40 Palacios, Fluctuaciones económica.
41 Personal communications with Ernesto López Losa (29 June 2016) about unpublished wage data in Hamilton
archive and with Enrique Llopis Angelan (3 Oct. 2016) about annual wages in Madrid. For wages in Toledo, see
Drelichman and Agudo, ‘Gender wage gap’.
42 Doria, Uomini e terre.
43 Romano, Prezzi, salari e servizi.
44 Verlinden, Documenten, pp. 437, 441.
labour in Augsburg between 1432 and 1755. It nicely illustrates the complexity of
comparing the various groups of labourers. Elsas tells us that the ‘recher’ (someone
who rakes the grain harvest) were usually women (‘meist eine Arbeit für Frauen’),45
but suggests that sometimes this kind of work was done by men. The comparable,
heavier harvesting task for which there are systematic data, the ‘schnitter’ (mower),
was the domain of men, but occasionally women did this kind of work as well.
Usually, however, men mowed and women raked (and perhaps bound), and we
therefore calculate the gender wage ratio as the difference between the wages for
raking and mowing. The data for Wurzburg are less problematic, as it is possible to
clearly distinguish the ‘Arbeiterinnen’ (female labourers) in agriculture (between
1429 and 1759) from the other ‘male’ jobs. In this case the comparable male
job is the ‘Erdarbeiter’ (digger). For both Augsburg and Wurzburg, Elsas gives
data for the entire wage distribution, which allows us to calculate the mean and
the mode.
The wages for Austria are based on the series of daily wages in Weyer in 1626–
1790 published by Pribram, both referred to as ‘Tagwerk’ (day work).46 The source
also contains a few wages of women working in the construction industry (making
mortar), which are on average 10–20 per cent higher than those in agriculture, but
the number of observations of that group is too small to use.
As noted above, for England we make use of the estimates of the casual (daily)
wages of women and men published by Humphries and Weisdorf. This is not
entirely unproblematic as their data have been derived from heterogeneous sources
and cover all kinds of (unskilled) male and female wage work, with the exception of
harvest work and the (higher) wages observed in London, which have been taken
out of the comparison.47 It is therefore not possible to determine for certain which
part of the change in the female wage ratio is due to changes in the composition of
the labour force, and which part is caused by ‘real’ changes in the gender wage ratio.
Moreover, their estimates are available not on an annual basis but only per decade,
which means that we cannot test our hypotheses about the changes in the gender
wage ratio in the same way as we can for annual data. Because of the limitations
of using the Humphries and Weisdorf data, we also used a dataset of the wage
assessments produced by the Justices of the Peace, put together by van Zanden.48
For a large set of counties in the period 1550–1760, these set the official wages
for men and women for two kind of harvest work, haymaking and reaping, and
therefore make it possible to find out how the gender wage ratio for the same kind
of work developed over time. This is the only source that does not relate to actual
wages paid, but most wage assessments have wages for both men and women for
the same job, which makes this source rather unique.
All the wage data provided in this article refer to daily wages. We do not
make use of the data on the annual wages of servants and other employees for
a variety of reasons. To begin with, the data seem relatively scant. The various
volumes of the ‘histories of prices and wages’ give only a handful of observations
for Flanders (Antwerp: ‘servants’, 1664–1797, but with many gaps), Spain (Old
45 Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte, vol. I, p. 713.

46 Pribram, Materialien zur Geschichte.
47 Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’, p. 411.
48 van Zanden, ‘Malthusian intermezzo’.
Castile: ‘servants’, 1501–50; New Castile: ‘servants’, 1601–50), Austria (Vienna:
‘nurses’, 1523–1779, also with many gaps), and Germany (Leipzig: ‘maids’, 1573–
1799), and they lack comparable series for male servants. Only in the case of Austria
is there evidence on the wages of male nurses, but this seems to include the wages
of their wives (‘Mannsvater und sein Weib’). In addition, their interpretation is rather
difficult. As Humphries and Weisdorf have pointed out, most farm and household
servants lived in, and room and board were an essential part of the employment
bargain. On top of that, servants’ contracts often came with additional payments
in kind. For instance, the servants employed at St Johannis-Hospital in Leipzig
were provided with shoes and clothing.49 Therefore, in order to present a series
for unskilled workers on daily remuneration implied in annual contracts one has
to make certain assumptions about the value of these payments in kind to estimate
the gender wage ratio (as Humphries and Weisdorf have shown), and the estimates
of the wage ratio seem very sensitive to the assumptions made.50
However, we also think that focusing on daily wages is a good strategy for
understanding the relative position of women. In cases where single women had
access to the casual labour market, it may inform us about the options they may
have had to remain single and set up their own households. Moreover, the focus on
daily wages informs us how much married women could contribute to the family
income, and/or if they could earn an income sufficient for a single household.
Table 1 gives an overview of the countries included in our sample and
summarizes the various sources that we have used. Our sample of countries—
England, the Low Countries, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy—is
reasonably well spread over western Europe, but we lack data on eastern Europe.
The well-known Polish price histories contain only a handful of data on female
servants in Warsaw between 1735 and 1770, but we cannot use these, as they refer
to annual wages.
II. The evolution of the gender wage ratio

Figure 1 gives an overview of the evolution of the gender wage ratio in Europe
between 1270 and 1800 (50-year averages) and online appendix S1 gives decadal
averages. In the south of Europe women earned about 50 per cent of the wage of
unskilled male labourers. In the northern and western parts of Europe this ratio
was much higher during the late medieval period, but it showed a declining trend
between about 1500 and 1800. In this section we analyse in more detail what
happened to the gender wage ratio in seven European countries. More specifically,
we use a simple strategy whereby we regress the wage ratios on a set of dummies for
decades to test for changes in the wage ratio over time to identify any ‘significant’
deviations from the base period (the first decade for which we have data). This
strategy allows us to distinguish between long-term swings in the gender wage ratio
and year-to-year movements. We do not add further control variables at this stage
because our focus is on identifying the presence or absence of long-run shifts in
the gender wage ratio across different countries. Our expectation is that in places
49 Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte, vol. II.

Figure 1. The evolution of the gender wage ratio in Europe, 1270–1800

[Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
Notes: Entries concern unweighted averages for half-centuries.
Sources: Rural England: Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’. Belgium (Antwerp): Verlinden, Documenten (1959, 1965).
Spain (Navarra, Aragon, and Seville): Hamilton, Money, prices and wages; Palacios, Fluctuaciones económica; López Losa (personal
communication; see n. 40). Germany (Augsburg and Wurzburg): Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte, vols. I and II. Italy (Piedmont and
Naples): Doria, Uomini e terre; Romano, Prezzi, salari e servizi. Sweden (Stockholm): Jansson et al., Dagligt bröd. Austria (Weyer):
Pribram, Materialien zur Geschichte.
where wage ratios are fixed by custom, the ratio will be stable; where market forces
dominate, shifts in the ratio are expected.
Table 2 summarizes the regression results for Italy and Spain. In all regressions
the reference category is the average wage ratio in the first period for which we
have data; this is reported in the cell with the constant. If it is equal to 1.00, women
received the same wage as men; if it is 0.80, the difference is 20 per cent. In table 2,
column 1 reports the results for Piedmont and column 2 for Naples. Column 3
shows the results for Aragon, column 4 for Navarra, and column 5 for Seville. The
regression results for Italy show a more or less trendless wage ratio. In Piedmont,
some modest variation around the wage ratio is observed between 1620 and 1630.
The regression results show that it was significantly different from 50 per cent
(our reference category, which is the average wage ratio in the period 1590–1600)
between 1620 and 1630, when it had decreased by 7 percentage points to 43 per
cent. In Naples, for which we have data for the eighteenth century, the gender
wage ratio is completely trendless (when the estimated coefficient for a decade is
zero, it means that the value of the wage ratio is identical to that of the reference
period). The results in columns 3 to 5 show that there was more variation in the
Spanish wage ratio, although it seems trendless. The series for Navarra in column
Table 2. Evolution of the gender wage ratio in Italy and Spain
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Italy Spain
Decade Piedmont Naples Aragon Navarra Seville
1270–80 REF
1280–90
1290–1300 0.01
1300–10 0.03
1310–20 0.20∗∗∗
1320–30
1330–40
1340–50 REF
1350–60 0.15∗∗
1360–70 0.07∗∗∗
1370–80 0.03
1380–90 0.01
1390–1400 0.07∗
1400–10 0.02
1410–20 0.19∗∗∗
1420–30 0.06∗∗
1430–40 0.09∗∗∗
1440–50
(…) 0.08∗∗∗
1580–90
1590–1600 REF
1600–10 –0.10
1610–20 –0.08
1620–30 –0.07∗∗∗
1630–40 0.00
1640–50
1650–60 0.02
1660–70 0.00
1670–80 0.00
1680–90 0.00 REF
1690–1700 0.00 0.02
1700–10 0.00 0.05
1710–20 0.00
1720–30 0.00
1730–40 0.00 REF
1740–50 0.00 0.00
1750–60 0.00 0.00
1760–70 –0.01 0.00
1770–80 0.00
1780–90 –0.07 0.00
1790–1800 0.00
1800–10 0.00
Constant 0.50∗∗∗ 0.50∗∗∗ 0.51∗∗∗ 0.44∗∗∗ 0.50∗∗∗
Observations 115 73 14 49 15
R2 0.84 0.01 0.34 0.42 0.04
∗∗∗ ∗∗
Notes: Standard errors are robust to control for heteroscedasticity. indicates significance at the 1% level, at the 5% level, and
∗
at the 10% level. In each column, the first coefficient represents the reference category.
4 suggests that the wage ratio slightly increased in the years following the Black
Death (from 0.44 in 1340 to 0.59 in 1350–60), but this was not sustained in the
years that followed; after the 1360s the wage ratio went back to c. 50 per cent,
a level that was also normal in the early fifteenth century and possibly beyond
(see columns 3 to 5).
Therefore, in the Mediterranean countries in our sample—Italy and Spain—

women usually received 50 per cent of the male wage.51 This ratio is clearly the
norm in Italy during the entire period and in late medieval Spain (for which we
have a number of datasets); the Seville data for the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries also point in this direction. We collected additional data to test this 50
per cent hypothesis. In his exhaustive study of prices and wages in Florence in the
fourteenth century, Charles de la Roncière was unable to find data on women’s
wages, but he estimated that women active in spinning earned about 50 per cent
of the wages of unskilled male labourers.52 The absence of women from most
studies of wages, prices, and labour markets in medieval and early modern Italy
may be due to the fact that they were not participating on a large scale in the
labour market.53 One exceptional source that does tell us about female labour
participation in the Tuscan countryside is the biographical memoir of the monk
Angiuliere, which reports the wages of men and women in Poggibonsi in 1373–4.54
The author concludes that women earned at best half the wage of men. The same
author also published detailed data on the wages paid to men and women in the
building industry in Siena (in 1340–1).55 The normal wage for women was 2 soldi
per day (34 out of 40 wage payments were at this level), whereas the normal wage for
men was 4 soldi (22 out of 70 wage payments were at this level). Interestingly, there
was a considerable spread of wage payments for unskilled men (ranging from 1/6 to
5/9 soldi/denari), whereas almost all women were paid the same. Moreover, (male)
‘masters’ earned between 5 and 10 soldi. In agricultural work, women also earned
about 50 per cent of the wage of men (for example, for cutting wood or carrying
manure). Male nightwatchmen on average earned 2 soldi, and female night workers
1 soldi.56 Finally, it is interesting to note that Federico et al., in their recent study
of the structure of wages in Italy in 1860–1913, find a similar gender wage ratio of
50 per cent; they quote the conclusion from a study by Ortaggi Cammarosano:
one of the most constant discrimination against women was their low level of wages. In
agricultural as in industrial work in work done at home as well as in the factory, women
received half the wages for men for doing the same job. This ratio remained constant over
many decades … It testified to the presence of custom and attitudes which went very far
back in time.57
We agree.
Moving to southern France, we find a similar pattern. Georges Duby collected
daily wages in the vineyards of Marseille between c. 1300 and 1480.58 The gender
wage ratio fluctuated between 50 and 60 per cent in the half-century preceding the
Black Death (50–60 per cent in 1306 and 53–56 per cent in 1331–6). The picture
51 See Drelichman and Agudo, ‘Gender wage gap’, for a different view on the gender wage ratio in Toledo between
1550 and 1650. They find that female compensation varied between 70 and 100% of male levels, with fluctuations
linked to relative labour scarcity. Their data, however, relate to annual wages of women employed by hospitals,
and therefore cover a different (most likely semi-skilled and higher) segment of the labour market.
52 de la Roncière, Prix et salaires, p. 439.
53 For a detailed discussion, see Piccinni, ‘Le donne nella mezzadria toscana’.
54 Balestracci, ‘Il memoriale di Frate Angiuliere’.
55 Balestracci, ‘Li lavoranti non cognosciuti’.
56 Ibid.
57 Ortaggi Cammarosano, quoted in Federico, Nuvolari, Ridolfi, and Vasta, ‘Race’, n. 19.
58 Duby, L’économie rurale, p. 562.
is very similar for the period after the Black Death: the gender wage ratio fluctuated
between 46 and 55 per cent in 1349–63, 47 and 56 per cent in 1409–30, and 44
and 53 per cent in 1480. The 50 per cent norm may have been a Mediterranean
phenomenon.
The Mediterranean zone may have extended to Toulouse, as 50 per cent was
the norm there as well, both in agriculture and in the building industry.59 In
northern France, on the other hand, as in the Low Countries and England,
women sometimes earned 90 per cent of the wage of men (again in the fourteenth
century).60
A second pattern characterized wages in north-western Europe, where we find
a much higher gender wage ratio in the late medieval period (and sixteenth
century), but a large decline during the early modern period. Table 3 examines
what happened to the gender wage ratios in Antwerp (columns 1 and 2) and
Stockholm (column 3). Both start at levels (80 per cent or more) that are unheard of
in the Mediterranean. In Stockholm female wages are in the 1610s even at par with
those of men, and this also happens occasionally in Flanders.61 And both series
show a decrease in the gender wage ratio to about 50 per cent in the eighteenth
century. For Antwerp it is possible to distinguish the mean and the modal wages
paid to both men and women. As expected, the gender wage ratio based on the
mode is often higher than that based on the mean (for the reference period this
is 93 per cent and 82 per cent respectively), indicating that the upper tail of the
distribution of unskilled male wages is higher than that of unskilled female wages
(the best-paid men earn more than the best-paid women). However, this difference
disappears over time, and after 1750 the wage ratio is 50 per cent on both counts.
The evolution of the Antwerp economy is also reflected in the gender wage ratio; the
crisis period of the 1490s results in a low wage ratio, whereas the booming economy
of the middle decades of the sixteenth century leads to a narrowing of the gender
gap.62 Similarly, Gary found that the development of the Swedish gender wage
ratio was clearly linked to periods of labour scarcity (resulting in near parity).63
This was probably a more general pattern, as additional wage data for sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Flanders (Gerardsbergen and Ghent) also point to a very
high gender wage ratio. In Holland the data that we do have point to a very high
gender wage ratio during the late medieval period, continuing into the seventeenth
century; but here as well, the gender wage ratio began to decline in the eighteenth
century, as it did in Antwerp, where it became trendless after 1760.64
The English data show this pattern in its most extreme version. Ideally we would
like to regress the wage ratio on decennial dummies to test for changes in the
wage ratio over time, but Humphries and Weisdorf ’s data are not available on
an annual basis. In column 1 of table 4 we therefore regress the decennial wage
ratio on dummies for half-centuries to obtain more insight into the evolution of
the English gender wage ratio. In addition to this, we make use of the dataset on
59 Perroy, ‘Wage labour in France’, data relating to the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
60 Delmaire, ‘La femme aux champs’.
61 See Verlinden, Documenten, pp. 377 and 544, for examples from Ghent and Geraardsbergen.
62 See van der Wee, Growth of the Antwerp market, for a detailed reconstruction of the Antwerp growth cycle.
63 Gary, ‘Constructing equality?’.
64 van Zanden, ‘Malthusian intermezzo’; van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Market wage or discrimination?’.
Table 3. Evolution of the gender wage ratio in Belgium and Sweden

(1) (2) (3)
Belgium Sweden
Decade Antwerp: mode Antwerp: mean Stockholm
1420–30 REF REF

1430–40
1440–50 0.00 0.11
1450–60 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗
1460–70
1470–80
1480–90
1490–1500 –0.53∗∗∗ –0.42∗∗∗
1500–10 –0.10 0.01
1510–20 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗
1520–30 –0.33∗∗∗ –0.25∗∗
1530–40 –0.15 –0.15
1540–50 –0.18∗∗∗ 0.00
1550–60
1560–70 –0.06 0.04
1570–80
1580–90
1590–1600 –0.32∗∗∗ –0.22∗∗
1600–10 –0.25∗∗∗ –0.13 REF
1610–20 0.21∗∗∗
1620–30 0.08
1630–40 –0.01
1640–50 –0.25∗∗∗
1650–60 –0.22∗∗∗
1660–70 –0.40∗∗∗ –0.29∗∗∗ –0.19∗∗∗
1670–80 –0.26∗∗∗
1680–90 –0.35∗∗∗
1690–1700 –0.41∗∗∗
1700–10 –0.40∗∗∗
1710–20 –0.38∗∗∗
1720–30
1730–40
1740–50
1750–60 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗
1760–70 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗
1770–80 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗
1780–90 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗
1790–1800 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗
1800–10 –0.43∗∗∗ –0.32∗∗∗ 0.81∗∗∗
Constant 0.93∗∗∗ 0.82∗∗∗
Observations 93 94 119
R2 0.49 0.50 0.87
Notes: As for tab. 2.
wage assessments set by the Justices of the Peace.65 The latter gives information on
agricultural wages for ‘reapers’ and ‘haymakers’ for a large set of counties between
1550 and 1760. In column 2 we regress the wage ratio on dummies for half-
centuries, a dummy indicating if food was included, a dummy for ‘reaper’ (where
‘haymaking’ is the reference category), and regional fixed effects. The wage data for

Table 4. Evolution of the gender wage ratio in England
(2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)
Region Region Region Region County County
(1) fixed fixed fixed fixed fixed fixed
Humphries and Weisdorf effects effects effects effects effects effects
1270–1300 REF 1600–50 –0.09∗∗∗ –0.05 –0.09∗∗ –0.03 –0.06∗ –0.06

(–3.01) (–1.35) (–2.45) (–0.80) (–1.76) (–1.52)
1300–50 0.03 1650–1700 –0.10∗∗∗ –0.10∗∗∗ –0.09∗∗ –0.09∗∗ –0.09∗∗∗ –0.09∗∗∗
(0.49) (–3.52) (–2.99) (–2.45) (–2.34) (–2.87) (–2.98)
1350–1400 0.01 1700–60 –0.18∗∗∗ –0.17∗∗∗ –0.15∗∗∗ –0.15∗∗∗ –0.09∗∗∗ –0.12∗∗∗
(0.20) (–6.00) (–4.88) (–4.79) (–3.89) (–2.99) (–3.23)
1400–50 –0.04 Food included –0.03 –0.04∗ –0.031 –0.04 –0.05∗∗ –0.06∗∗
(–0.84) (–1.61) (–1.83) (–1.34) (–1.49) (–2.40) (–2.45)
1450–1500 –0.09∗∗ Reaper 0.00 0.02 0.022 0.05∗ 0.05∗ 0.05∗
(–2.06) (0.03) (0.96) (0.78) (1.81) (1.76) (1.72)
1500–50 –0.17∗∗∗ Hertfordshire 0.13∗∗ 0.10
(–4.12) (2.05) (1.40)
1550–1600 –0.35∗∗∗ Kent –0.07 –0.10
(–8.24) (–1.19) (–1.38)
1600–50 0.28∗∗∗ Lincolnshire 0.07 0.04
(–6.57) (1.27) (0.67)
1650–1700 –0.20∗∗∗ Northampshire 0.06 0.04
(–3.36) (1.00) (0.51)
1750–1800 –0.14∗∗∗ Oxfordshire –0.09 –0.10
(–3.05) (–1.50) (–1.53)
1750–1800 –0.22∗∗∗ Rutland 0.04 0.01
(–5.22) (0.65) (0.08)
1800–50 –0.33∗∗∗ Staffordshire –0.03
(–9.04) (–0.39)
Constant 0.74∗∗∗ Sussex –0.06
(–1.23)
Warwickshire –0.03 –0.05
(–0.55) (–0.68)
Wiltshire 0.11∗ 0.09
(1.82) –1.15
Middle –0.01 0.00 –0.05 –0.02
(–0.30) (0.11) (–1.29) (–0.71)
South –0.021 0.04 –0.05 0.02
(–0.77) (1.34) (–1.53) (0.61)
West –0.04∗ –0.04 –0.07∗∗ –0.05
(–1.66) (–1.64) (–2.15) (–1.63)
Constant 0.77∗∗∗ 0.74∗∗∗ 0.78∗∗∗ 0.74∗∗∗ 0.70∗∗∗ 0.73∗∗∗
(26.28) (22.89) (21.29) (19.00) (10.62) (9.73)
Observations 54 Observations 142 118 111 87 111 87
R2 0.81 R2 0.16 0.28 0.16 0.29 0.43 0.48
∗∗∗ ∗∗
Notes: Standard errors are robust to control for heteroscedasticity. indicates significance at the 1% level, at the 5% level, and
∗
at the 10% level. In cols. 2–7 the reference categories are: ‘1550–1600’, ‘Food excluded’, and ‘Haymaker’. In cols. 2–5, where
we control for region, ‘East’ is the reference category. In col. 6 ‘Staffordshire’ is the reference category; in col. 7 ‘Sussex’ is the
reference category.
the county of Sussex are the only ones that include wages for different categories
of workers; that is, it reports wages for ‘first-class’ and ‘second-class’ labourers.
Since the other counties do not make such a distinction, we omit Sussex in column
3. For some of the counties the wage assessments had information only for one
period (which means that there is no variation in the assessed wage between 1550
and 1760). To make sure our dataset captures enough variation over time, we omit
them in column 4. Column 5 is our baseline result where we exclude Sussex and
the counties for which we had no time-varying information on the evolution of the
gender wage ratio. Columns 6 and 7 control for county fixed effects. Column 6
repeats the analysis of column 4 and column 7 does so for column 5.
The results in column 1 of table 4 demonstrate that the gender wage ratio was
very high, about 75 per cent in the decades before the Black Death. In the century
after the Black Death the wages of women stay at this level. Perhaps this is due to
the limited number of observations, but an alternative explanation would be that
women profited even more than men from the sudden scarcity of labour. Penn
makes this point: ‘Indeed, during a period of severe labour shortage such as that
which followed the Black Death it would seem that the less well paid labourers,
including women, were in a far better bargaining position when it came to both the
type of work which they were required to do, and the wages which they received’.66
He gives many examples of women earning the same wage as men in the years
following the Black Death.67 In the sixteenth century, however, the gender wage
ratio decreased dramatically, to less than 50 per cent in the second half of that
century, according to the data collected by Humphries and Weisdorf.68
The regression results for the evolution of the wage ratio from the wage
assessments in columns 2–7 show similarly high levels of variation: there are
considerable fluctuations in the wage ratio over time. In sub-period 1600–50, the
decade coefficients are not always found to differ significantly from the reference
category (1550–1600), but there is a clear break visible around 1650–1700. As the
regression results demonstrate, the wage ratio tended to decline over time. The
wage ratio was 12 to 15 percentage points lower in 1700–60 than in 1550–1600.
The timing of this decline is different from the development of the gender wage ratio
as estimated by Humphries and Weisdorf, which was rising in the same period, a
divergence that we cannot explain satisfactorily, but which may reflect shifts in the
nature of the assessments.69 However, this difference does not invalidate the key
point that both series show that the gender ratio in England was not stable over the
long run.
The shifts we observe in the gender ratio in Humphries and Weisdorf’s series are
consistent with the pattern of population growth and increased surpluses of labour
in this period. The economic boom that began in the seventeenth century resulted
in a marked increase in GDP per capita and significant structural change combined
with stagnation in the population level.70 This coincided with, and probably caused,
an increase in the gender wage ratio from 30–40 per cent to 60–70 per cent in the
first half of the eighteenth century. The acceleration of population growth (and
the deceleration of per capita GDP growth) in the second half of the eighteenth
century—what has been called the ‘Malthusian intermezzo’—resulted in a sharp
66 Penn, ‘Female wage-earners’, p. 8.

67 See also the discussion in Langdon, ‘Minimum wages’; however, it should be noted that food was given in
addition to the wage. Hence, if men ate more than women, the ratio of total wages would be slightly less than
100%.
69 The assessed wages went from being a maximum to being a minimum. This means that the decrease in the
gender wage ratio may have been less strong than our analysis suggests. It may also explain why the timing of the
decline in the assessed wages is different from the development of the gender wage ratio as estimated by Humphries
and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’. Future research is needed to explore this issue fully.
70 Broadberry et al., British economic growth; Wallis, Colson, and Chilosi, ‘Structural change’.
decline in the gender wage ratio, which continued into the first half of the nineteenth
century.71 All in all, the gender wage ratio, which had been 80 per cent in the late
middle ages, fell to 40 per cent in the first half of the nineteenth century: an amazing
decline in the relative wages of women that requires explanation.
The regressions explaining the wage ratio derived from the wage assessments by
the Justices of the Peace also allow us to analyse whether there were differences
between regions and (agricultural) occupations. Although not always found to be
statistically significant, there is a small difference in the gender pay ratio between
unskilled occupations: on average, the wage ratio was 5 percentage points smaller
for ‘reapers’ than for ‘haymakers’ (via the coefficients in columns 5 and 7). The
regression results also show that there was some regional variation in the gender
wage ratio (see columns 6–7). On average the gender wage ratio was somewhat
higher in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire than elsewhere in England. Interestingly,
these are two counties that had a relatively high share of their (male) labour force
in agriculture between c. 1550 and 1650. This may suggest, albeit very tentatively,
that there was greater demand for female day workers in agriculture in these two
counties.72 Overall the results suggest that the wage ratio fluctuated over time even
when controlling for county fixed effects and occupation. This again aligns with the
idea that in England these wages were influenced by relative productivity and set by
market forces, rather than custom. The decline in the harvest premium for women
that we observe in the wage assessment data is moreover consistent with the pattern
of structural change in this period. The growing share of the workforce outside
agriculture means that at harvest time there was a larger reserve of supplementary
labour upon which to draw.
In between the North Sea area and the Mediterranean, in Germany and Austria,
we find a pattern that is in many respects intermediate (see table 5). The starting
levels of the gender wage ratio in the fifteenth century are in between the level in
the south and in the north-west at that time, and, as in the north-west, there is
a tendency towards a decline in the wage ratio, in particular in the seventeenth
century, but it is much more modest than in the North Sea area. At the end of
the period, both in Augsburg and in Wurzburg, the decline of the female wage
ratio reverses and turns into a rise. The differences between the mean and the
mode are in both cases small, which points to the fact that in these two cases the
distribution of female and male unskilled wages are similar. In the very long run,
the gender wage ratio in Germany and Austria is more or less trendless at 55 to 65
per cent, confirming its intermediate position between the 50 per cent wage ratio
in the south and the more steeply declining wage ratio from 70 per cent and more
to 40 per cent in the north-west. A similar pattern of a fairly flat wage ratio of about
two-thirds was found by Adelsberger for Vienna.73 Following Ogilvie’s analysis of
the labour market and socio-economic conditions in central Europe in general,
stressing the importance of guild pressure, community norms, and the inefficiency

72 For shares in agriculture, see Wallis et al., ‘Structural change’. Please note that this exercise is very tentative:
more research is needed. Hertfordshire and Wiltshire were also two counties that experienced a relatively rapid
decline in the male labour force in agriculture between the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
73 Adelsberger, ‘Occupational wage differentials’.
Table 5. Evolution of the gender wage ratio in Germany and Austria

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Germany Austria
Decade: Augsburg: mode Augsburg: mean Wurzburg: mode Wurzburg: mean Weyer
1420–30 REF REF

1430–40 REF REF
1440–50 0.04 –0.05∗∗∗
1450–60 0.60∗∗∗ 0.24∗∗∗ –0.22∗∗∗ –0.16∗
1460–70 0.00 0.03
1470–80 0.06 0.03 –0.17 –0.14
1480–90 0.15∗∗ 0.10∗∗
1490–1500 –0.08 –0.10∗∗∗ –0.07 –0.03∗∗∗
1500–10 –0.08 –0.06∗∗ 0.01 0.04
1510–20 –0.01 –0.01 –0.01 0.02
1520–30 –0.03 –0.01 0.08∗∗∗ 0.09∗∗∗
1530–40 –0.15∗∗∗ –0.13∗∗∗
1540–50 –0.03 –0.02
1550–60 –0.06 0.03
1560–70 0.05 0.09∗∗∗
1570–80 –0.06 –0.02
1580–90 –0.10∗ –0.10∗∗∗
1590–1600 –0.13∗∗∗ –0.13∗∗∗ 0.00 0.03∗∗∗
1600–10 –0.05 –0.01
1610–20 –0.04 –0.02 0.03 0.02
1620–30 –0.142 –0.14∗∗ –0.02 –0.04 REF
1630–40 –0.09 –0.08 –0.42∗∗∗ –0.35∗∗∗ 0.04
1640–50 –0.07 –0.08∗∗ –0.06 –0.05∗∗ –0.05
1650–60 –0.06 –0.11∗∗∗ –0.10∗∗∗ –0.05∗∗∗ –0.10
1660–70 –0.06 –0.06∗ –0.08∗∗∗ –0.05 –0.12
1670–80 –0.11∗∗ –0.11∗∗∗ –0.12
1680–90 –0.11∗∗ –0.11∗∗∗ 0.33 0.18 –0.10
1690–1700 –0.10∗ –0.11∗∗∗ 0.24∗∗ 0.36 –0.06
1700–10 –0.08 –0.11∗∗∗ –0.12
1710–20 –0.10∗ –0.11∗∗∗ 0.17 0.20 –0.12
1720–30 0.10∗∗ 0.09∗∗∗ –0.07
1730–40 0.06 0.05∗ –0.03
1740–50 0.10∗∗ 0.08∗∗∗ 0.01
1750–60 0.04 0.06∗∗∗ 0.17 0.23∗ –0.10
1760–70 0.10
1770–80 0.01
Constant 0.56∗∗∗ 0.56∗∗∗ 0.67∗∗∗ 0.64∗∗∗ 0.62∗∗∗
Observations 147 146 38 37 122
R2 0.50 0.50 0.81 0.83 0.40
Notes: As for tab. 2.
of information flows, we tentatively conclude that there may have been a third,
‘intermediate’ pattern of wage formation for women in this part of Europe.74
In summary, we find two ‘extreme’ patterns in the Mediterranean and north-
western Europe, and an ‘intermediate’ pattern in Germany and Austria. These very
different patterns, we speculate, are related to different structures of labour market
engagement.75 The available data show that female wage labour was quite usual in
74Ogilvie, Bitter living.

75These differences have of course also been noted by social historians writing about the labour force
participation of women; Thane, ‘Review’, for example, states in her review of Hufton’s book on women in
north-western Europe. In the Mediterranean women mainly participated in certain
segments—spinning, for example—and their wages were trendless at around 50 per
cent of the wage of unskilled men, suggesting they were more affected by custom
than by relative scarcity. Penn made a similar point, comparing the favourable
position of English women after the Black Death with ‘the sort of discrimination
against hired female labour which one sees, for example, in the wages paid to
women employed during the grape harvests in Toulouse’.76 We hypothesize that
women participated on a larger scale in labour markets in north-west, but were still
‘marginal’ in the sense that their wages increased rapidly in periods of scarcity, and
fell sharply when there was a growing labour surplus.77 Women were drawn into
the labour market when it was tight, but had a hard time finding employment in
times of excess labour supply.
Whereas the economic position of women in the North Sea region in the late
medieval period was relatively strong (in view of the high gender wage ratio),
our data also show that there was a deterioration afterwards: there was a gradual
decrease in the gender wage ratio from c. 80 to 90 per cent in the early sixteenth
century to 50 to 60 per cent in the eighteenth century. Following Ogilvie’s analysis,
free market forces were more important in north-western Europe than in central
Europe, but the price women paid for their relative free access to labour markets
was the risk of a steep decline in their relative wages.78 Even in the north-west,
women did not access employment on the same terms as men. The result was that
they were more exposed to shifts in economic trends.
III. The real earnings of women in the long run

What were women able to buy with the wages they earned? Can we compare the
purchasing power of their wages over time and between places? In this section we
address the question of what the purchasing power was of the wage that women
received. We specifically ask whether a woman could earn sufficient income to
maintain a household consisting of herself alone—could she, in other words, remain
single on the basis of the wage earned? If she could earn her own living, it tells us
something about her autonomy; her relative bargaining position within and outside
the household.
It should be noted, however, that in England casual day labour was proscribed
for young unmarried women. In addition, cultural and social factors made it hard
for young unmarried women to travel in search of casual day labour.79 These
constraints may also have operated in other parts of Europe. In these circumstances,
only ‘older’ single women and married women had access to casual day labour,
western Europe between 1500 and 1800: ‘I wish she had discussed further the implications of the differences
which emerge throughout the book between North-western Europe and the Mediterranean south. In the latter
codes of honour kept women’s lives more constrained within the home, family structures were larger and more
dominant’. Contemporary literature documents that in particular Italian women have a low level of labour force
participation, which is often ascribed to the pressures of family and the weakness of the Mediterranean welfare
state; see discussions in Martinovic, ‘Female employment’, and Moreno, ‘Model of social protection’.
76 Penn, ‘Female wage-earners’, p. 8.
77 See also Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations’, for the very high participation ratios for women in London,
and Barron, ‘“Golden age”’, for the medieval period.
78 Ogilvie, Bitter living.
79 See Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’.
and the number of working days presented here should be interpreted as saying
something about how many days ‘older’ single women with access to the casual
labour market had to work to earn the bare-bones basket. Similarly, for married
women it tells us something about how much they were able to contribute to the
family income.
We use the adapted Allen approach, which tries to reconstruct the purchasing
power of male wages in comparison with the budget needed for a family of four
people (a man, a woman, and two children). There are two versions of this basket:
the bare-bones basket, which contains the basic essentials to survive, and the
respectability basket, which is closer to the actual budget in early modern Europe.
Our calculations concern the bare-bones basket for a single adult (and a necessary
minimum consumption of 1,950 kcal per day, as in Allen’s original paper), which
can be seen as some kind of absolute poverty line.80 In addition, in order to find out
how much women could potentially earn, we do not estimate a welfare ratio, but we
estimate the number of days of work necessary to earn this income using equation
1. This follows the methodology of Allen and Weisdorf and is preferable because it
does not make any assumptions about the number of days worked.81 As Hatcher,
Stephenson, and Humphries and Weisdorf have pointed out, it is unrealistic to
assume that a male day labourer worked 250 days per year in the medieval and
early modern period, and it may be even more unrealistic for women.82
days per year = annual costs of barebones basket/day wage (1)
In other words, we ask how many days a woman had to work in order to
earn a bare-bones living. The estimates for England are based on the bare-bones
basket for Oxford instead of London because it concerns rural wages. In addition,
since Humphries and Weisdorf ’s series for unskilled female workers does not
include harvest wages, we also provide estimates using the information derived
from the wage assessments. This allows us to make comparisons with the other
European regions too, as they are based on harvest and/or construction work (see
the discussion in section I and table 1).
Table 6 presents the estimates for the number of working days a woman had
to be active on the labour market to earn a bare-bones basket for herself (for a
family of three—one parent and two children—this would be double this amount).
Turning to the results, in Antwerp the number of days needed fluctuated between
30 and 45 days per year from 1400 to 1800. In England, this was true only for the
fifteenth century. In the century before the Black Death about 77 days of work were
required to earn a bare-bones basket. This dramatically changes after 1348, when
real wages—of men and women—increased sharply, and about 37–57 days of work
was necessary (and the picture is probably a clear lower bound as it is based on non-
harvest wages). The period 1540–1650 saw a sharp increase in the number of days
required: at the beginning of the seventeenth century, more than 100 days were
required for a single bare-bones basket. However, the picture seems less negative
80 It should be noted that the calorie requirements built into the original barebones basket by Allen, ‘Great
divergence of European wages’, might be inadequate especially for women who are assumed to be capable of
harvest and haymaking work; see Humphries, ‘Lure of aggregates’; Allen, ‘High wage economy’.
81 Allen and Weisdorf, ‘Industrious revolution’.
82 Hatcher, ‘Unreal wages’; Stephenson, ‘Looking for work?’; Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’.
Table 6. Number of working days required for bare-bones subsistence level, 1300–1800
England Germany Spain
Low Humphries and England Augsburg Italy Aragon,
Countries Weisdorf, ‘Wages Wage Sweden and Austria Piedmont Navarra,
Antwerp of women’ assessments Stockholm Wurzburg Weyer and Naples and Seville
1301–50 77.3
1351–1400 57.4
1401–50 26.4 39.8 19.1 39.4
1451–1500 52.5 37.2 39.0 42.8
1501–50 34.5 50.8 50.7
1551–1600 38.2 98.6 52.0 61.8 93.3
1601–50 31.9 111.0 75.8 44.2 72.2 46.7 69.4
1651–1700 42.2 76.1 63.8 60.0 34.8 54.2 64.3 65.9
1701–50 50.7 54.5 66.0 42.2 51.2 115.1 62.7
1751–1800 44.9 65.5 50.3 65.0 167.9
Sources: See tab. 1.
if we look at the evidence derived from wage assessments which considers harvest
wages (c. 50–75 days were needed). The period 1650–1750 saw a strong decline in
the number of working days needed to earn a bare-bones basket, reflecting the rise
of female real wages. This coincided with the stagnation of population growth and
the acceleration of economic growth.83 During the second half of the eighteenth
century women again had to work more days to earn the subsistence basket. In
Sweden, the real wages of women tended to decline in the long run, increasing the
number of days needed from about 42 days to about 66 days. For Italy and Spain
there are gaps in the series, but if the 50 per cent female wage ratio applied to
the period as a whole, as we expect, then women’s real wages would have been only
slightly lower than those in the north-west in the fifteenth century. In Spain, women
required c. 40 days to earn a bare-bones living; in Italy this was c. 50 days. In the
long run, real wages in the south of Europe declined. In the eighteenth century,
Italian women had to work c. 115–165 days to earn a subsistence basket, and in
Spain c. 63–93 days.84
Summing up, the fifteenth century was, all over Europe, probably the best period,
when only about 30–50 days of work were necessary to earn enough for a very basic
living. That 30 to 50 days—about seven weeks of six days or probably as long as the
harvest season would last—is not a lot, and this low number suggests that this was
indeed a golden age for working women with access to the casual labour market.
Given the low number of days, the use of harvest wages is clearly relevant for these
comparisons. If our estimates are correct, in the later middle ages women could
earn a basic living only on the basis of their harvest work.
Differences in days needed started to emerge after the late middle ages. In Spain
the real earnings of women were as high as in England in the fifteenth century (c. 40
days), but the decline thereafter was much more moderate. This is a surprising little
divergence that is the reverse of the little divergence that Allen originally identified
83Broadberry et al., British economic growth.

84Assuming that the 50% female wage ratio applies to the period as a whole, results in the following number of
days: Spain: 1301–50: 99.0; 1351–1400: 57.6; 1401–50: 46.8; 1451–1500: 54.7; 1501–50: 84.4. Italy: 1501–50:
55.4; 1551–1600: 75.3; 1601–50: 74.9; 1751–1800: 92.9.
in men’s real wages. For men in north-western Europe, wages developed more
favourably in this period and did not decline to a similar extent as they did in the
south and east. Looking at the English series, the reverse occurred: women’s wages
in England declined over time, and much more steeply than in the south and east of
Europe. This is perhaps the most striking result of this analysis. However, we should
also note here that the Antwerp data do not show a sharp decline in real wages
during the sixteenth century, which is more consistent with the little divergence
hypothesis. However, the overall pattern—a more or less constant gender wage ratio
in the south and a decline in relative female wages in the north-west—is clearly not
consistent with the idea that in terms of the purchasing power of wages earned the
north-west moved ahead of the south.
IV. Discussion and conclusion

What have we learned about labour markets, gender relations, and economic
development from this overview of female wages and their purchasing power in
western Europe before 1800? First, we tentatively suggest that the remuneration of
women’s work was not the same in different parts of Europe. In the Mediterranean
we observe a tendency for the relative wages of women to oscillate around 50 per
cent of the wages of unskilled men in comparable occupations. Following Ortaggi
Commarosano, this can be attributed to the long-established presence of custom
and attitudes.85 The wage data from southern France for the late medieval period
show the same gender wage ratio. This pattern can be interpreted as a sign of
discrimination against women. A 50 per cent female–male wage ratio is below
the relative strength of women and men, which is usually taken to be about two-
thirds.86 Of course, the productivity of women’s labour was highly dependent on
the degree to which they were actually allowed to work, and acquire skills (even
‘unskilled’ work requires skills, such as the ability to do physical work for 12 or more
hours per day). In that respect, labour force participation is clearly a virtuous—or
in its absence, a vicious—circle, in which pure physical strength arguably plays a
secondary role. We think that this Mediterranean pattern fitted into a different
system of family formation, as sketched in the recent literature on the EMP.
For north-western Europe we find that the relative pay of women showed long-
term trends consistent with their relative scarcity or, perhaps more accurately, the
relative scarcity of unskilled labour in general. In the late middle ages, and in some
regions also in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the gender wage ratio
was relatively high, perhaps as high as 80 per cent (in England in the late middle
ages), and we even find cases of wage parity (in post-Black Death England, in
Sweden in the early seventeenth century, in Flanders/Antwerp in the sixteenth
century, and in Holland in the seventeenth century). Some authors have concluded
that as women received the same wage if they did the same work, discrimination
was absent from late medieval labour markets.87 However, this would be a mistake.
Discrimination is evident in the way the gender wage ratio fluctuates with the ebb
85 Ortaggi Cammarosano, ‘Labouring women’, p. 181.

86 Bishop, Cureton, and Collins, ‘Sex difference in muscular strength’; Chen, Liu, and Yu, ‘Comparative study
of strength’.
87 Penn, ‘Female wage-earners’.
and flow of the labour market: women profited disproportionally from a tight labour
market, and their wages declined disproportionately when there was a surplus.
In that sense they were marginal: they were drawn into the labour market when
demand grew more rapidly than supply, and, vice versa, were pushed out first when
men found it difficult to get a job. England is clearly the most extreme case of a
switch from a very high to an extremely low gender wage ratio. The scale of this shift
is probably also related to structural changes in the agricultural sector, such as the
enclosures and the rise of large-scale farming, which appears to have lowered the
demand for female wage labour.88 The early mechanization of spinning, in which
many women specialized, may also have depressed this demand.89 The German
and Austrian case is again different: the wage ratio is on average higher than in
the Mediterranean, and shows strong fluctuations (in particular in Germany), but
remains more or less the same in the very long run (it does not show the sharp
decline that is usual in the North Sea area).
Our results are also important for the debate about the determinants of the
gender wage ratio, specifically the question of whether customs and social norms or
productivity and market forces determined the remuneration of women. The more
or less stable relative pay levels of women in the Mediterranean are consistent with
the idea that in this kind of society custom ruled, and economic productivity and
supply and demand had only a limited impact on relative pay levels. It is striking
that the rule that women earned about 50 per cent of the wages of men appears not
to have changed fundamentally during the long period that we study. The north-
western pattern shows the opposite; that is, the power of market forces. However,
this has to be nuanced: the relative physical strength of women, which is often
used as an explanation for why markets value their labour less than that of men,
was probably more or less constant over time. Physical productivity therefore does
not explain why their relative pay varied from 40 to 80 per cent of that of men:
there is no evidence that the relative pay for strength has changed so much over
time. Markets may have ruled in north-western Europe more than in the south,
but because social norms determined where women stood in the queue for jobs
their relative pay showed the sharp swings documented in this article. Since they
were at the back of the queue, their relative wages fluctuated even more than those
of unskilled male labourers. In the south, customs determined market outcomes;
in the north-west, customs determined the position of women in the labour market
and therefore, indirectly, via the relative scarcity of labour, their relative pay.
DOI: 10.1111/ehr.13045
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Supporting information
Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting
Information section at the end of the article.
S1. Evolution of the gender wage ratio in Europe, 1270–1800
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Article in The Economic History Review · January 2021

Alexandra de Pleijt Jan Luiten van Zanden

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Two worlds of female labour: gender

Labour market engagement by women is an important determinant of female

T he ‘little divergence’ or ‘reversal of fortunes’ is the process whereby the North

∗ Authors’ Affiliation: Utrecht University.

12 Allen, ‘Great divergence in European wages’.

19 Penn, ‘Female wage-earners’.

I. Data on female wages

Table 1. Overview of data used

37 Jansson et al., Dagligt bröd.

45 Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte, vol. I, p. 713.

II. The evolution of the gender wage ratio

49 Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte, vol. II.

Figure 1. The evolution of the gender wage ratio in Europe, 1270–1800

Therefore, in the Mediterranean countries in our sample—Italy and Spain—

Table 3. Evolution of the gender wage ratio in Belgium and Sweden

1420–30 REF REF

Notes: As for tab. 2.

65 van Zanden, ‘Malthusian intermezzo’.

1270–1300 REF 1600–50 –0.09∗∗∗ –0.05 –0.09∗∗ –0.03 –0.06∗ –0.06

66 Penn, ‘Female wage-earners’, p. 8.

71 van Zanden, ‘Malthusian intermezzo’.

Table 5. Evolution of the gender wage ratio in Germany and Austria

1420–30 REF REF

Notes: As for tab. 2.

74Ogilvie, Bitter living.

III. The real earnings of women in the long run

Sources: See tab. 1.

83Broadberry et al., British economic growth.

IV. Discussion and conclusion

85 Ortaggi Cammarosano, ‘Labouring women’, p. 181.

88 van Zanden, ‘Malthusian intermezzo’.

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