Authors: Gabriele Cappelli (University of Siena) and Johannes Westberg (University of Groningen)
How do gender inequality and occupational segregation play out in white-collar occupations in a developing economy? We contribute to answering this research question in economic history by focusing on Swedish teachers in the late 19th century. Indeed, most existing research on occupational segregation and the gender pay gap focuses on unskilled workers and blue-collar jobs (Stanfors et al. 2014; Humphries and Weisdorf 2015; Burnette and Stanfors 2020; de Pleijt and van Zanden 2021), though some exceptions exist (Molinder and Pihl 2023; Palma, Reis, and Rodrigues 2023). We contribute to this line of research by focusing on Swedish-teachers micro-data from c. 1890.
We use an untapped source (Statistics Sweden 1891) that lists, for c. 1890, all primary-school teachers in Sweden, including their wages and individual-level info: employment, gender, school type, other occupations, etc. In Sweden, teachers were a very important white-collar job at the time, so their analysis should be seen as quite representative of white-collar jobs. Female teachers were by far the largest group within women’s labour force after trade and commercial clerks, representing c. 20 percent of the total (Söderberg 1972). Figure 1 shows a picture of the primary source.
Figure 1: Statistics Sweden. 1891. ‘Avlönings- Och Pensionsstatistik 1881–1915’ (BiSOS X).
We provide two main results. First, a statistically-significant gender pay gap (10 percent) can be observed among Swedish teachers – even when the relationship between earnings and other individual and local determinants of wages is considered, by relying on regression analysis that includes several individual-level and county-level controls (Burnette and Stanfors 2020). Secondly, we find that wages for teachers in minor and junior schools provided substantial premia compared to outside options in the labour market (while this was not the case for men), which explains both occupational segregation and the feminization of the teaching profession, through growing employment in such school types (Cappelli and Quiroga 2021; Evertsson 2023). (figure 2).
Figure 2. Female-teacher premia (against agricultural wages) and the feminization rate (junior and minor primary schools).
The gender wage gap and occupational segregation of this key female white-collar occupation thus shed new light on the feminization of primary schooling in the complex setting late 19th-century Sweden. The comparatively low wages of female teachers appear as the result of an occupational structure created by the central government to promote school enrolments and supported by school legislation and the allocation of government grants.
Local school boards saw the potential of junior schools and minor primary schools, and their mainly female teaching staff, to keep school spending down. Instead of promoting firm survival, as was the case in Swedish tobacco industry (Stanfors et al. 2014), the feminization of teaching instead reduced local school spending. The occupational structure of the teacher profession in Sweden provided opportunities for women that lacked post-primary education. Since the capacity of teacher training in Sweden was very limited, and junior schools and minor primary schools did not require a teaching certificate, the increasing number of positions in such schools were open for women that had merely enjoyed a primary education.
In that sense, the “quiet revolution” within the teaching profession in Sweden was intimately linked to occupational segregation, where the latter was the price that women had to pay to gain access to this white-collar profession.
References
Burnette, Joyce, and Maria Stanfors. 2020. ‘Understanding the Gender Gap Further: The Case of Turn-of-the-Century Swedish Compositors.’ The Journal of Economic History 80 (1): 175–206.
Cappelli, Gabriele, and Gloria Quiroga. 2021. ‘Female Teachers and the Rise of Primary Education in Italy and Spain, 1861 – 1921: Evidence from a New Dataset’. The Economic History Review 74 (3): 754-783.
Evertsson, Jakob. 2023. ‘“Making Teaching Cheap”: Secondary Employment and Feminisation in Elementary Schools in the Uppsala Region in Central Sweden, 1861–1910’. Paedagogica Historica (early view).
de Pleijt, Alexandra, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. 2021. ‘Two Worlds of Female Labour: Gender Wage Inequality in Western Europe, 1300–1800†’. The Economic History Review 74 (3): 611–38.
Humphries, Jane, and Jacob Weisdorf. 2015. ‘The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850’. The Journal of Economic History 75 (2): 405–47.
Molinder, Jacob, and Christopher Pihl. 2023. ‘Women’s work and wages in the sixteenth century and Sweden’s position in the “little divergence”.’ The Economic History Review 76 (1): 145-168.
Palma, Nuno, Jaime Reis, and Lisbeth Rodrigues. 2023. ‘Historical Gender Discrimination Does Not Explain Comparative Western European Development: Evidence from Portugal, 1300-1900’. Explorations in Economic History 88 (C).
Söderberg, Tom. 1972. Två sekel svensk medelklass: Från gustaviansk tid till nutid. Bonnier.
Stanfors, Maria, Tim Leunig, Björn Eriksson, and Tobias Karlsson. 2014. ‘Gender, Productivity, and the Nature of Work and Pay: Evidence from the Late Nineteenth-Century Tobacco Industry’. The Economic History Review 67 (1): 48–65.
Statistics Sweden. 1891. ‘Avlönings- Och Pensionsstatistik 1881–1915’ (BiSOS X).