Gender bias in nineteenth-century England: Evidence from factory children

Gender bias against girls in nineteenth-century England has received much interest but establishing its existence has proved difficult. We utilise data on heights of 16,402 children working in northern textile factories in 1837 to examine whether gender bias was evident. Current interpretations argue against any difference. Here our comparisons with modern height standards reveal greater deprivation for girls than for boys. Discrimination is measured in girls' height-for-age score (HAZ) falling eight standard errors below boys' at ages 11, 11.5 and 12 years of age, capturing the very poor performance of factory girls. But this result cannot be taken at face value. We query whether modern standards require adjustment to account for the later timing of puberty in historical populations and develop an alternative. We also test the validity of the age data, considering whether parents were more prone to lie about the ages of their daughters, and question whether the supply of girls was fundamentally different from that of boys. We conclude that neither proposition is justified. Disadvantage to girls remains, although its absence amongst younger children precludes an indictment of culturally founded gender bias. The height data must remain mute on the source of this discrimination but we utilise additional information to examine some hypotheses: occupational sorting, differential susceptibility to disease, poorer nutrition for girls, disproportionate stunting from the effects of nutritional deprivation, and type and amount of work undertaken. Of these we suggest that girls had to do arduous physical labour in the home alongside their factory work. The only (unsubstantiated) alternative is that girls were more likely than boys to be put into factory work below the legal age limit. Both represent forms of gender bias.

The Evolution of Occupational Segregation in the United States, 1940-2010: Gains and Losses of Gender-Race/Ethnicity Groups

The aim of this article is twofold: (1) to descriptively explore the evolution of occupational segregation of women and men of different racial/ethnic groups in the United States during 1940-2010, and (2) to assess the consequences of segregation for each group. For that purpose, in this article, we propose a simple index that measures the monetary loss or gain of a group derived from its overrepresentation in some occupations and underrepresentation in others. This index has a clear economic interpretation. It represents the per capita advantage (if the index is positive) or disadvantage (if the index is negative) of the group, derived from its segregation, as a proportion of the average wage of the economy. Our index is a helpful tool not only for academics but also for institutions concerned with inequalities among demographic groups because it makes it possible to rank them according to their segregational nature.

["Caciquismo" and medical profession: the case of Alfredo Alegre, 1915-1924]

The professional recognition and sanitary reforms that physicians sought from the political powers throughout the constitutional era of the reign of Alfonso XIII were a continuation of those from the XIXth century. One of the most important demands was that rural physicians should answer directly to the State, especially with reference to salaries, rather than to municipal authorities generally held by caciques. There were constant problems between them. This work presents the case of the physician from El Pobo, Alfredo Alegre, whose conviction put health professionals, students and most of society on the warpath, joining their demands to a petition for pardon. This tragic story, apart from showing the importance of the daily press as a source, highlights the difficulties offered by professional practice in rural areas submerged in the past and the inability of politicians to resolve problems during one of the most hectic periods of our history.

From motherhood penalties to husband premia: the new challenge for gender equality and family policy, lessons from Norway

Given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality, the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality. We examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer-employee data from Norway, 1979-96, a period with extensive expansion of family policies. The motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996. Among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant. In 1979, the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty, but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties.

Historical data indicates a wage premium for black registered nurses

The average observed wage of Black registered nurses (RNs) is higher than that of White RNs in the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses over 2 decades from 1984 to 2004. In this study, wages of Black and White RNs were analyzed controlling for factors likely to affect wages in addition to race. Results indicate racial inequality in wages of RNs: Black RN wages exceeded White RNs wages over 2 decades from 1984-2004. This significant difference remained after controlling for factors likely to affect wages in addition to race such as experience, education, employer type, and specialty among other factors.

The full-time clinical faculty: what goes around, comes around

In his 1910 report entitled Medical Education in the United States and Canada, Abraham Flexner advanced an ideal model of medical education that included a university-based, full-time, salaried faculty whose time was devoted to teaching and research. This article traces the evolution of the "full-time" concept for clinical faculty and describes factors that have affected its implementation. Between 1910 and the 1930s, the full-time system for clinical faculty was implemented at a limited number of medical schools, but lack of financing made the system generally unworkable. The implementation of the "geographic" full-time concept during the 1940s to 1960s allowed faculty to be considered full-time while earning much of their income from clinical practice. Even then, there were concerns that medical schools would bring pressure on such faculty to increase their clinical activity for the purpose of supporting the institution. After the rise of private and public payers, clinical practice income came to be an explicit and increasingly important source of medical school revenue. This stimulated a significant expansion in the number of full-time clinical faculty over the next 40 years. In the 100 years following the Flexner Report, clinical faculty became "full-time" and "salaried," but not in the way Flexner imagined. Instead of deriving their salaries from the resources of the medical school, they are significantly contributing to institutional financing through their practice. Flexner's concern about the "distraction" of clinical practice interfering with faculty participation in education has come full circle, remaining a primary issue in medical education today.

The eighteenth-century vagrant contractor

This article traces the salient developments in poor law and vagrancy law that led to the counties of England and Wales being obliged to shoulder the financial burden of the mobile poor throughout the eighteenth century. It shows that despite the lack of statutory authority many, probably most, counties contracted with a new type of official to implement the conveyance of vagrants under vagrancy legislation in an attempt to counter suspected negligence and profiteering by constables. It shows, with particular reference to Middlesex and the West Riding, that the terms and conditions of these contracts varied considerably, and describes arrangements for the vagrants. The article also suggests reasons why the mobile poor formed an increasing segment of the population well into the nineteenth century and finds that by then the contractors were suspected of the same faults as the constables before them, leading to the abandonment of the contractor system.

The road not taken: the 1945 Health Services Planning Commission proposals and physician remuneration in Saskatchewan

This article examines the development of the medical services in Saskatchewan with respect to physician remuneration from 1915 to 1949. In particular, it seeks to determine why the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government of T. C. Douglas did not follow the recommendations of its Health Services Planning Commission for the establishment of a state salaried medical service based on the province's salaried municipal doctor system. The validity of the explanations in the established historical accounts of this policy decision is assessed based on empirical evidence. It provides a clearer understanding of how and why fee-for-service payment became entrenched in Saskatchewan Medicare.

Asylum and community: the Athens Lunatic Asylum in nineteenth-century Ohio

This paper examines the role of the village of Athens, Ohio, USA, in the founding and operation of the Athens Lunatic Asylum during the nineteenth century. Taking as its sources official, personal and popular culture documents, the paper focuses on the function of this Asylum as a participant in the economy of its surrounding community. The Athens Lunatic Asylum was deeply connected with its community, functioning as a market for local goods and services as well as an employer. Connections between the Asylum and the community were supported by a physical infrastructure of transportation and utilities as well as a political infrastructure that operated locally and at the state level. Implications for mental health care and for community are proposed.

Competing for jobs: labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process

While much research has documented the pattern and extent of sex segregation of workers once they are employed, few studies have addressed the pre-hire mechanisms that are posited to produce sex segregation in employment. While the notion of a labor queue-the rank order of the set of people that employers choose among-plays a prominent role in pre-hire accounts of job sex sorting mechanisms, few studies have examined the ways in which job candidates are sorted into labor queues. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms by which labor queues contribute to the gendering of jobs by studying the hiring process for all jobs at a call center. Being placed in a queue has a clear gendering effect on the hiring process: the sex distribution of applicants who are matched to queues and those who are rejected at this phase diverge, and among those assigned to queues, women are prevalent in queues for low pay, low status jobs. The screening process also contributes to the gendering of the population of hires at this firm. Females are more prevalent among hires than they are among candidates at initial queue assignment. Among high status jobs, however, males are more prevalent than females. Moreover, there are important wage implications associated with matching to queues. While there are large between-queue sex differences in the paid wages associated with allocation to queues, once allocated to queues the wage differences between male and female candidates are nil. Consequently, the roots of gender wage inequality in this setting lie in the initial sorting of candidates to labor queues.

The gender gap reloaded: are school characteristics linked to labor market performance?

This study examines the wage gender gap of young adults in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000 in the US. Using quantile regression we estimate the gender gap across the entire wage distribution. We also study the importance of high school characteristics in predicting future labor market performance. We conduct analyses for three major racial/ethnic groups in the US: Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, employing data from two rich longitudinal studies: NLS and NELS. Our results indicate that while some school characteristics are positive and significant predictors of future wages for Whites, they are less so for the two minority groups. We find significant wage gender disparities favoring men across all three surveys in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000. The wage gender gap is more pronounced in higher paid jobs (90th quantile) for all groups, indicating the presence of a persistent and alarming "glass ceiling."

[Physicians' households in the 16th century]

16th-century's medicine was marked by a wave of professionalization: besides scientific influences--evident by new ambitious texts on botany, anatomy, and chemiatry--functions of medical expertise for political purposes were an important factor. Based on findings made in my DFG-funded project "Arztliche Autorität in der Frühen Neuzeit" (medical authority in early modem times) is discussed how these influences altered the professional conditions for physicians. "Haushalt" (household) can be understood as a social community as well as a monetary budget in this context: physicians earned their money with a lot of different ventures beside medical practice, as commerce, farming, banking, or mining etc. Expenses for houses, gardens, interior etc. were based on needs of everyday life but could also be signs of luxury. Thus the physicians demonstrated the high social status they had acquired, and some of them thereby placed themselves at one social level with the nobility. Even scientific books can be estimated as a special case of such a conspicuous consumption for in most cases publishing made high investments without monetary benefit necessary. Thus scientific reputation was to some degree foreseeable: epoch-making books like above all Andreas Vesalius' "De humani Corporis fabrica libri septem" (Basel 1543) had to be financed out of the assets of the family (in Vesalius' case: a high-standing family in the emperor's services). Other sources show clearly that many doctors were not able to afford publishing comparable elaborated and expensive books.

Public Health Nursing Competencies 1953-1966: Effective and Efficient

The Quad Council of Public Health Nursing Organizations developed public health nursing competencies in 2003. They are guides for determining skills at two levels, and they identify public health nurses as providing care to individuals and families or to populations and systems with the nurse having proficiency, awareness, or knowledge. The primary purpose of this paper is to discuss historical nursing roles and qualifications as judged by the 2003 competencies, including educational preparation and experience for the administrative and staff nurse. The historical exemplar for the nursing roles is a combination public/private nursing association, referred to as the partnership, that took place in 1953-1966. Primary sources include archived material from the Instructive Visiting Nurse Association, Richmond, VA. Administrative responsibilities were divided between the chief nurse and the nursing supervisors. Staff nurse responsibilities included clinic activities, home visitation, and referral coordination between health care organizations. The delineation of nursing roles demonstrates nurses' meeting the 2003 competencies. Based on the Quad Council's 2003 public health nursing competencies, the partnership nurses were competent.

Hot pack, nursing costs and suicide: the BJN over 100 years ago

The following are some of the interesting pieces which appeared in the BJN over 100 years ago. They include: the use of a hot pack for patient care and treatment, the costs of employing a qualified nurse and the efforts of workers to afford such a person, suicides in patients and nursing staff.

"A finer and fairer future": commodifying wage earners in American pulp science fiction

Long-neglected by scholars, the pulp science fiction (SF) magazines of the Gernsback era (1926-1937) are due for re-examination. Presumed to be sub-literary stories for boys or, paradoxically, escapist leisure reading for practicing scientists and technicians, the SF from this period is actually neither. It is a powerful resource for understanding the ways ordinary people engaged with the promise and peril of industrial modernity. Published by a passionate entrepreneur seeking fame and fortune, composed by writers paid piecework rates and read by young science and technology enthusiasts aspiring to authentic remunerative work, the earliest pulp SF necessarily provoked inter-class discussions about labor, management, production and consumption.

A century of general practice

The role of NHS general practitioners looks likely to expand over the next few years. The history of the specialty shows they are used to change

Old patterns, new meaning: the 1845 hospital of Bezm-i Alem in Istanbul

This paper discusses the history of an 1845 Ottoman hospital founded by Bezm-i Alem, mother of the reigning sultan Abdülmecit I (reigned 1839-1856), embedded in the medical and political contexts of the Middle East in the nineteenth century. The main focus of this paper is the Ottoman discourse of modernization, which identified progress with modernization and westernization and induced a belief in the positive character of progress, with a high degree of optimism regarding the success of the process. The Bezm-i Alem hospital illustrates the medical reality of the 19th century, reconstructed through Ottoman eyes rather than from the perspective of foreigners with their own agenda and biases. In many respects it continued previous medical traditions; other aspects reveal brand new developments in Ottoman medicine and hospital management. Ottoman medical reality was one of coexistence and rivalry: traditional conceptions of medicine and health were believed and practiced side-by-side with new western-like concepts and techniques.

Working for herself: case study of a private duty nurse, 1965-1974

Private duty nursing is not well researched in Australian history of nursing literature. While it would appear private duty nursing formed the main avenue of employment for trained nurses during the first part of the twentieth century, this type of nursing seems to have disappeared by the mid 1970s. This paper used a case study obtained from an oral history project to examine possible factors contributing to the phasing out of private duty nursing. It concluded there were two main influential issues: an increase in the use of medical technology and the impact this had on nursing practice; and an increase in the financial value placed on nursing which saw nursing wages increase dramatically from 1970.

The choice: Lewellys F. Barker and the full-time plan

In 1914, Lewellys F. Barker, William Osler's successor as Professor of Medicine and physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, resigned to enter private practice rather than accept the terms of a full-time plan, whereby professors in clinical departments would be salaried like other professors in the university. Barker had been an early proponent of the full-time plan. His decision reflected not only a personal desire for a larger income but also contradictions inherent in the Flexnerian ideal of clinical medicine as a research-oriented university discipline devoid of financial incentives to see patients. In private practice, Barker maintained a high profile as a teacher, writer, supporter of the Johns Hopkins medical institutions, and public figure. The issues raised by his difficult decision remain relevant and have not been satisfactorily resolved.

The relation of wages to the public health. 1918

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From socialist principles to motorcycle maintenance: the origin and development of the salaried physician model in the Israeli Public Health Services, 1918 to 1998

For more than 70 years, physicians in the Israeli health care system have been employed on a fixed salary rather than on a fee-for-service basis. The present report is a brief review of the origin and development of this unique salaried physician model and its effect on the terms of physicians' employment. Archival documents were reviewed. The salaried physician model was introduced to ensure egalitarian health care for patients rather than equal payment for physicians. It was accepted by physicians because it guaranteed their employment and income. However, over the years, the salaried physician model has evolved into a complex wage scale, with multiple fringe benefits that bypass formal agreements in order to reward individual physicians. In addition, the salaried physician model has encouraged illegal private practice, which is viewed today as one of the major problems of the Israeli Public Health Services.