Industrial, regional, and gender divides in British unemployment between the wars

Abstract Despite a substantial body of literature on the severe unemployment crisis in interwar Britain, our understanding of its distributional impacts remains limited. Using newly digitized government data, this paper analyzes the gender, industrial, and regional composition of unemployment 1923–1936. I find that the unemployment rate was higher for men owing in part to a strongly gender-segmented labor market, that unemployment was widespread across industries and not just a product of the declining staple industries, that unemployment exhibited strong seasonality, and that regional unemployment differentials cannot be primarily attributed to regions’ varying industrial compositions. These results offer a more granular view of this mass unemployment episode.