Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/681

 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES PAID TO MEN AND WOMEN women who are capable of doing nearly the whole of some indus- trial process, fail to master some incidental small part of it. Women weavers can seldom 'tune' or set their own 'looms. Women heraldic engravers have, curiously enough, never been able to point their own gravers, and have, in consequence, nearly abandoned that occupation. More commonly women workers are untrained, or only partially trained, for their work, and even if they learn to perform the lower branches of it well enough, they lack the masterly grasp which is required in the higher ranks of the industrial army. It is upon advantages of this kind that rest both the popular view of the superiority of men over women workers, and the accepted custom in the division of employments. Where that custom is departed from, and women are successfully introduced into a new branch of industry, it is generally on the occasion of some change in the process whereby the work has been brought within the capacity of the woman worker. In such a case wages not unnaturally tend to fall, just as those of the 'Amalgamated' Engineer would fall if a new machine suddenly enabled his work to be done by a tramway conductor. It is not so much a super- session of men by women as of skilled workers by those less skilled. Indeed, if we considered only cases of this class, there would be much to be said for the view that the inequality existing in remuneration between those occupations monopolised by men, and those to which women are relegated, might have no relation to sexual cleavage, but be merely a case of 'non-competing groups' of skilled and unskilled labour. If women workers in women's trades earn less than men in trades which are still exclusively men's, so do dockers earn less than carpenters, and even farm- labourers in Dorsetshire less than farm-labourers in Durham. The problem of the inequality of wages is one of great plurality of causes and intermixture of effects, and we might not impro- bably find that, as is often the case, there is no special 'women's question' in the matter. The inferiority of women's wages is, however, to be gathered not so much from a comparison of the rates for identical work, for few such cases exist, but rather from a comparison of the standards of remuneration in men's and women's occupations respectively. Looked at in this ligh it seems probable that women's work is usually less highly paid than work of equiva- lent difficulty and productivity done by men. The women earn less than men not only because they produce less, but also because uu2