Abstracts of Papers Presented at the 2023 Annual Meeting

When measuring women's labor force participation, we might want to know: How much time did women spend working, rather than in leisure?How much time did women spend on market work, as opposed to non-market work?Did women do their work inside or outside the home?How much time did women spend in domestic services, as opposed to agriculture, manufacturing or other services?Unfortunately measuring labor force participation will not give us accurate answers to any of these questions.This paper uses data from nineteenth-century European household accounts to demonstrate that using labor force participation to measure women's work is misleading.If we really want to understand women's work in the past, we need to adopt continuous, rather than binary measures, and we must stop assuming that market work equates to work done outside the home, and that household production equates to domestic services.