Male-Female Wage Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

Traditional male-female wage discrimination measures rely on residuals from earnings functions that standardize for observable characteristics. But many productivity determinants are unobservable, and existing proxies for them are often difficult to interpret. Instead of using the earnings-function approach, we estimate production functions, using data from the 1839–45 and 1860–65 French industry censuses for textiles. While most of our findings cast doubt on the idea of discrimination against women in pay, they do not rule out some other forms of discrimination, such as occupational segregation.

Economic transition and gender differentials in wages and productivity: Evidence from Chinese manufacturing enterprises

“…In 1994, a new labor law was passed sanctioning the right of employers to dismiss workers. In 1997, the government launched a large-scale labor retrenchment program in an attempt 2 Several researchers have studied gender wage discrimination in established market economies using firm-level data (Cox and Nye, 1989;Hellerstein and Neumark, 1998;Hellerstein and Neumark, 1999;Hellerstein et al, 2000) Inspired by this new approach, Zhang and Dong (2008) provides an exploratory study of the gender wage gap using data on Chinese industrial firms. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of that dataset with a different empirical framework.…”

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