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To be or not to be? Risk attitudes and gender differences in union membership

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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.

Publishing year

2016

Language

English

Publication/Series

Lund Papers in Economic History. Education and the Labour Market

Issue

144

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