This book seeks to overturn almost every assumption that exists in the literature about women and wages in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Burnette does not disagree that women were occupationally segregated from men and earned lower wages, but she discards all the traditional explanations of why this was the case, such as custom, gender ideology, and the crowding of women into a small number of occupations. Rather, she insists that women's lower pay was a natural effect of the market, given women's lower productivity. This assertion that wage gaps had almost nothing to do with gender discrimination has a secondary claim attached to it; that occupational segregation, in fact, benefited women by “saving them from feeling the full force of their lower productivity” (137). Burnette maintains that occupational segregation is produced through comparative advantage, which “improves women's relative productivity because it allows them to work where the penalty to their lesser strength is smallest” (145). Under this premise, a job that might initially look lower paid could end up giving women higher wages than they could earn competing unsuccessfully for higher pay.

The first chapters are devoted to ascertaining women's actual work and wage patterns by combining and comparing statistics from parliamentary papers, commercial directories, censuses, farm and business records, reports of local conditions (such as those of Arthur Young), and the secondary literature, including large samples from agricultural rather than industrial work. Burnette concludes that while occupational segregation was probably even larger than usually assumed, wage gaps were smaller. She argues that practices such as in-kind payments, shorter hours for women, or “hiding” women's pay inside of men's by giving both wages to the husband meant that only rarely were women's wages as low as one-third of men's but more commonly half to three-quarters. Furthermore, this lower pay was not discriminatory but reflected real differences in results because strength was a more important variable than most modern scholars like to admit. Thus, “in agriculture and manufacturing, differences in productivity were large enough to explain the portion of the wage gap that is not explained by measurement error” (102). However, none of the studies she cites claiming that women had only 40–80 percent of men's productivity are from nineteenth-century Britain. Burnette nonetheless maintains that only in “less competitive” areas of the economy did wage discrimination exist.

In competitive parts of the labor market (defined as those most easily entered, not those for which scarce skills might be required), competition benefited women because they could undertake the occupational sorting that minimized wage differences. Burnette acknowledges the presence of gender ideology but denies it was the main cause of women's inferior position in the labor market. One disconcerting facet of this conclusion, however, is that it is based on models that assume markets really did work according to pure economic theory, which “suggests that gender discrimination can only persist where it is protected from competitive forces” (274). Similarly, models on “occupational sorting” assume that gender is not a relevant variable, only strength and skill. “I assume that individuals of either sex could acquire equal amounts of skill if they had the incentive to do so. … If there are barriers that prevent women from acquiring skill in a certain occupation, then the market is not competitive” (139). Few women facing “non- competitive” markets would gain much comfort from this theory nor one that attributes much of the relative increase of the gendered wage gap during the Industrial Revolution to women's “bad luck” (122) in having skills more likely to be replaced by machines.

In the latter parts of the book, Burnette moves from unskilled work to examining women's relative position in skilled labor and professional jobs. In these situations she attributes discrimination and barriers to women's employment almost solely to “non-competitive” situations such as family relations or professional organizations and unions that used their market power to limit competition. She argues that employers rarely engaged in true discrimination but acted solely out of economic motivation. Examples of employers who refused to hire women, such as Cadbury, are set aside by arguing that the Cadbury brand name was so valuable that it constituted a state of monopoly. Complaints from companies about the ill effects of women's work or how it benefited society to pay them less are dismissed as a disingenuous cover. Whatever employers might have said, she argues, in practice, they sought women workers and cannot be blamed for shutting them out of the market. Burnette argues that gender ideology was not the cause of gender segregation and women's lower pay but the result of them. Actors unable to truly understand the market and economy made up gender ideology to justify differences. “Most people do not understand how economic forces set prices, and tell other stories about how prices are determined. … Even if custom or ideology was invoked to justify the wage gap, that does not mean that custom or ideology was necessarily the cause of the wage gap” (133, 135).

Perhaps, as with the idea of separate spheres, gender ideology has become too easy a shorthand for scholars, but does that mean that it “was created as a marketing tool to convince people to accept the restrictions on female employment that benefited particular groups of male workers” (325)? While employers often ignore gender if economic motivation is strong enough, how could gender ideology have mattered in the skilled and professional market, yet have had little to no effect on employers of unskilled labor? Moreover, there was no market incentive to hire women if the gendered wage gap truly reflected a productivity gap, drawing into question employers’ motives. More pertinently, can the argument that gender discrimination and low wages are a mere correlation be based on the premise that employers or male workers did not really mean what they said about discrimination? While carefully researched, Burnette's book seems to reflect more about economic theory on labor markets in the Industrial Revolution than their historical reality.