This book is an excellent addition to the literature on women's work during the British Industrial Revolution, but also a controversial one (see the excellent debate in Social Science History 33, no. 4 [Winter 2009]: 459–504). Using a wide range of sources, including census data, commercial directories, farm records, and contemporary accounts, Joyce Burnette provides new estimates of women's pay and occupational structure. These are a contribution in its own right, but generally tend to confirm the prevalent view that female wages were considerably lower than men's, and that women tended to cluster around certain occupations and were not present in many others. The study, however, departs from most of the previous literature on the topic when trying to explain the causes for these differences, and this is where its originality lays. Most of the literature on the determinants of women's pay rests on cultural constructs of women's role in society. Women, according to this view, were discriminated against in the labor market due to an increasingly prevalent social discourse that assigned them the primary role of mothers and wives, and devalued their contribution as workers. This condemned women to the lower paid jobs, confined them to feminized occupations, and defined them as less-skilled workers. While Burnette admits that some descriptive sources reflect this gender ideology, the main thesis of the book is that it rarely translated into discrimination against women in the labor market.

Wage discrimination exists when equally productive workers are rewarded differently for their labor. Burnette's research confirms that for nearly all economic activities, female daily earnings were lower than male's, but her contention is that this just reflected lower female productivity, stemming from lower output per hour (notably in agriculture, but cases are also found in manufacturing) and from fewer hours a day worked. Evidence to support this claim is not easy to come by: the most solid piece of evidence of absence of discrimination is that with very few exceptions piece rates, which directly reward output, did not vary by gender (p. 84). But as for other productivity estimates, Burnette often resorts to examples from other countries and time periods, and more evidence on British workers' output would be needed to prove that the gender gap can be fully explained by a productivity gap. It has also been suggested that women's wages were rigid, customary, or not determined by the market. Against this view, Burnette provides many examples of women's wages responding to market conditions: wars, mechanization, and local employment opportunities all affected women's employment and pay, and farm accounts show that women's wages varied over time. When records show that women were paid low and suspiciously uniform wages (p. 151), Burnette suggests that this was a common way of rewarding casual workers, but does not provide evidence of a similar remuneration system for male casual workers.

Biological differences—lesser strength and childrearing—emerge as central to understanding the gender productivity gap. Strength was key to many jobs in nineteenth-century Britain, notably agriculture but also mule spinning. Weaker workers earned less, and evidence on male age-earnings profiles shows that declining muscle power also imposed a penalty on male earnings (p. 41). Burnette not only suggests that differences in strength translated into productivity and pay differences, but also that occupational sorting by strength led to a Pareto efficient outcome and minimized the wage gap by allocating women to the less physically demanding tasks. Childrearing also altered women's comparative advantage since they had a monopoly over pregnancy, giving birth, and breastfeeding. As a result, women had fewer incentives to acquire human capital, and whenever possible—as in the cottage industry—chose to work fewer hours. In an illuminating regression exercise (p. 320), Burnette shows that increasing household income levels can explain up to three- quarters of the observed decline in married women's labor force participation after 1860, implying that married women preferred, if economically viable, to stay at home. Women's agency in this move, and the consequences it had on women's welfare and lives, are unfortunately—although consciously—left unexplored.

The thrust of this book, propelled by neoclassical economic theory, is that competitive markets will eliminate any discriminatory practice. Whenever evidence of wage discrimination is found—as in for example the wages paid to workhouse administrators—the author is quick to remind us that the market was not competitive: in this example, a woman had to be appointed to govern the girls' section in the workhouses (p. 103). Barriers to women's employment, such as professional organizations, are also placed outside the market. Gender ideology could only be influential within institutions that did not have to compete to survive, such as the family and the government (p. 15). And businesswomen-to-be had problems accessing loans because capital markets, based on trust and reputation, were imperfect (p. 283). Even women's restricted access to education is here labeled as “premarket discrimination.” Given, however, that perfectly competitive markets were not the norm in nineteenth-century Britain, and given that nonmarket institutions have a huge impact on women's agency and working lives, this book cannot pretend to be a comprehensive account of women's economic position in Industrial Revolution Britain, and its attempts to filter gender ideology out of any economic decisions ring as historically inaccurate. Labor markets, after all, do not operate in isolation from society.

Notwithstanding the author's blind faith in the positive effects of the market, this is a persuasive and very meticulous study. Burnette's ability to combine anecdotal and empirical evidence to sustain her arguments, and to always give more weight to the latter, does her credit. This will hopefully encourage those who remain skeptical about the book's tenets to unearth more data and to adopt as solid a methodological framework. The debate on the determinants of the gender gap, in the past as in the present, is far from closed.