When the play of current economic forces places upon women work which men could perform more easily, or creates women's industries with conditions of labour involving excessive strains upon the organism, the double human costs are even heavier.For if excessive fatigue or nervous strain affects a woman as worker, the injurious costs are likely to be continued and enhanced through her capacity for motherhood.To use up or damage its women by setting them to hard wage labour in mill and workshop is probably the greatest human waste a nation could practise or permit.For some of the prevailing tendencies of modern industrialism appear to be more 'costly' in their bearing upon women than on men.In regard to factory work, and all other industrial work involving a long continuous muscular or nervous strain, or, as in shop labour with its long hours of standing, medical authorities are unanimous in holding that women suffer more than men.1 'If a like amount of physical toil and effort be imposed on women, they suffer to a larger degree,' states Sir W.MacCormac.2 Statistics of employment from various countries agree in showing that the amount of morbidity, as measured by the number of days lost by illness, is greater among working-women than among working-men, and that the mortality of working-women is greater than that of workingmen, notwithstanding the fact that the average life of a female is longer than that of a male.Long hours and speeding-up of machinery thus evidently inflict graver organic costs on women than on men.Where piecework is in vogue, it furnishes a stronger stimulus to over-strain in women, because the general lowness of their wage gives a larger importance to each addition.
§3.Thus in comparing the human costs of producing a given quantity of goods, due account must be taken of the distribution of the output of productive energy among workers of different sexes, and ages.The earlier tendency of the factory system in this country, the existing tendency in some countries, has been to impose a growing of monotonous and fatiguing labour upon women and children.At certain stages in the development of industrial machinery, this has been held to be a 'profitable' economy, and in many processes of hand labour subsidiary to the factory system it still survives.Though legislation and other influences have done much to check the worst injuries of child employment in factories and workshops in more civilised communities, a great amount of human cost is still incurred under this head.Child half-timers are still used in considerable numbers in textile factories, while the vast expansion of distributive work has sucked into premature wage-earning immense numbers of boys who ought to be at school.It is probable that the net tendency of British industry in recent years has been towards a slow reduction of the more injurious and 'costly' forms of female employment.Though an enormous number of females are engaged in work the hours and hygienic conditions of which escape legal regulation, probably a growing proportion of employed women come under an economy of shorter hours.The drudgery of domestic service engages a less number of women, while the opening of a larger variety of employments both in manufacture and in commerce has somewhat improved their power to resist the excessive pressure of machine-conditions.The recent organised attack upon the 'sweated industries', however, reveals the fact that at the lower level of many trades a great mass of oppressive and injurious labour is extorted from working-women.Certain forms of new mechanical labour, not involving heavy muscular fatigue, but taxing severely the nervous system, are occupying a large number of women.The type-writer and the telephone have not yet been brought into conformity with the demands of health.Though machinery is generally bringing in its wake restrictions on hours of labour, the normal work-day of factory, office and shop still imposes a gravely excessive strain upon women employees.No small proportion of this excessive cost of women's work, however, is attributable to legal, professional, or conventional restrictions, which, precluding women from entering many skilled and lucrative employments, compel them to compete in low-skilled and overstocked labour-markets.The social waste of such sex discrimination is two-fold.Even in trades and professions for which men have usually a greater aptitude than women, some women can perform the work better and more easily than some men, and, if they are denied equal opportunity of access, the work is done worse or at a greater human cost.The refusal to admit women into the learned professions upon equal terms with men undoubtedly involves a loss to society of some of the finest service of the human intellect, while it entrusts some of the skilled and responsible work, thus denied to women, to relatively ignorant and incompetent men.The other human cost is perhaps even heavier.For the excessive competition, to which women are thus exposed in the occupations left to them, depresses the remuneration in most instances below the true level of physical efficiency, induces or compels excessive hours of labour, breaks down the health of women-workers and injures their life.
