Women Helping Women? Gender and Peer Effects among Late Nineteenth-Century Industrial Workers

Maria Stanfors, Centre for Economic Demography/Dept of Economic History, Lund University
Joyce Burnette, Wabash College

Does working with productive peers increase individual output and wages? Recent studies have shown the importance of co-workers for productivity in the contemporary labor market. We assess peer effects on earnings in the past, exploiting matched employer-employee data from the Swedish cigar industry circa 1900. Unlike most historical data, this source provides detailed individual and firm-level characteristics for men and women performing identical tasks, allowing for a rare controlled analysis of workplace dynamics. The research investigates whether earnings were primarily driven by individual traits, firm characteristics, or co-worker composition. Results show that individual factors - primarily experience - accounted for 71% of wage variation for men and 61% for women, with earnings typically plateauing after the first few years. Firm-level impacts were distinctly gendered: while both sexes earned more in major cities, large firms and high-revenue workplaces paid a premium to men but offered no such benefit (and sometimes lower pay) to women. Evidence for peer effects was found only under specific conditions. Experienced co-workers improved the earnings of others exclusively when both the learner and the peers were female. In contrast, male wages showed a slight negative correlation with the presence of more experienced colleagues. These patterns suggest that peer effects in this context functioned through knowledge spillovers and on-the-job training rather than social pressure. The benefits were concentrated among low-experience women, indicating a mechanism of gender-specific mentorship or solidarity. These findings highlight the importance of considering gendered group dynamics when analyzing productivity and wage spillovers in both historical and contemporary labor markets.

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 Presented in Session 75. Women at Work