Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/675

 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES PAID TO MEN AND WOMEN 653. letters, and filling up forms and schedules). form, I am assured, rather better and more rapidly than Th salaries paid to them for the same number of hours' per day as the men, are as follows: This work they per- men o work On Entering, age 17 to 5t5. Second year. Third year. 52 On promotion. 12 heads of Divisions. 95 I Matron 115 These salaries, which are perhaps less than half what would have to be paid to men for similar work, have been found sufficient to attract an overwhelming number of applicants, a fact to be accounted for, in some degree, by the appointments being known to be restricted to the daughters of professional men. For women's work, the'gentility' of the occupation is still accepted as part payment. Hence women clerks are cheap to the Prudential, in spite of their being absent from sickness, as I am informed by the Manager, more than twice as much as the men. 1 Moreover, it has been found impossible to intrust them with any but the merest routine work, and this, it must be remembered, is a draw- back to their 'nett advantageoushess' to the employer. His higher staff must be recruited, and he would therefore prefer, other things being equal, to fill his lower ranks with workers from whom he could select superior individuals for promotion. Moreover, although men can be yet often be set over men, even governing faculty. set over women, women cannot if they are found to possess the It is, perhaps, partly for the reason of ' gentility' that women teachers almost invariably receive lower salaries than men teachers. The Education Department Repor[ for 1889-90 gives the average for men teachers throughout England and Wales as 119 as compared with 94 in 1870, and that for women teachers as 75 as compared with 57 in 1870. 1,556 male teachers out of 17,449 had attained 200 a year, or nearly 9 per cent.; whereas only 380 female teachers out of 26,139 reached that level, or about 1 per cent. The average salary of 320 head masters under the London  This, it was suggested, was due not so much to serious illnesses as to slight indispositions, in which the women are said to show' less pluck'than the men in sticking to their work. But the men's work is their life-career; the women's a mere prelude to matrimony, and often only a source of pocket-money.