Maria Stanfors
Professor
To be or not to be? Risk attitudes and gender differences in union membership
Author
Summary, in English
Attracting membership while stifling freeriding and heterogeneous preferences among potential members is critical for trade union success. Women are generally seen as less inclined to join trade unions, particularly at the onset of the labor movement. We highlight a previously neglected explanation for this: the importance of risk and gender differences in assessment hereof. We study matched employer-employee data from two industries around the year 1900 where union membership was associated with different levels of risk: the Swedish cigar and printing industries. We find that the gender gap in membership was larger in the high-risk environment (cigar) and smaller in the low-risk environment (printing). Women were not hard to organize but avoided risks and uncertain returns.
Department/s
- Centre for Economic Demography
- Department of Economic History
Publishing year
2016
Language
English
Publication/Series
Lund Papers in Economic History. Education and the Labour Market
Issue
144
Full text
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Document type
Working paper
Publisher
Department of Economic History, Lund University
Topic
- Economic History
Keywords
- trade unions
- risk aversion
- gender
- 19th century
- 20th century
- Sweden
Status
Published
Project
- The Emergence of Wage Discrimination
- Manufacturing gender inequality