Research on the intergenerational inheritance of occupational attainment has been restricted to sons for a long time. This is remarkable, given the ubiquity of historical settings where female labor force participation was high. This study of civil marriage certificates in nineteenth-century West Flanders investigates a comprehensive sample covering the economic activities not only of fathers and sons but also of mothers and daughters. We find that daughters were more mobile than sons. Daughters, however, enjoyed less growth in terms of intergenerational mobility against the background of a slowly industrializing economy.
Although recent studies on the geography of the female labor force have highlighted strong spatial variation in women’s labor market participation, little is known about regional female wage inequalities in nineteenth-century industries. An analysis of female regional wage inequality for late-nineteenth-century Belgium, a country known for its early industrialization, finds a positive correlation between female industrial employment and wage levels, underlining the importance of industrial labor demand in shaping the female labor market experience. This finding is augmented by a correlational analysis of various market drivers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.