ELHN Conference 2017 – CFP “Wages, family budgets and gender in Contemporary Europe”

Wages, family budgets and gender in Contemporary Europe

Session proposed to the Working Group Labour and Family economies (coord. Manuela Martini, Cristina Borderias)

Luisa Muñoz Abeledo, History Department, University of Santiago de Compostela, luisamaria.munoz@usc.es

Giovanni Vecchi, Universita de Roma 2 Tor Vergata, giovanni.vecchi@uniroma2.it

The literature on wages and family budgets in contemporary Europe has not yet analyzed real wages taking into account wages of men, women and children in the long term. Little is known of the wage differential between men and women, and less of the contribution that female wage made to family income. Wages series available in Spain rarely include women, thus we can not participate in the international debate on the role of women’s wages in economic growth or in the transformation of demographic behavior (Humphries and Weisdorf, 2015).

We consider that new series should be built that integrate women’s wages, given the fact that historical activity rates of women were high, both in urban and rural economies. Furthermore, family budgets are an optimal way of identifying inequality and poverty trends in the long run and they let us see how families responded to the economic environment (Horrell and Humphries, 1992; Vecchi, 2016).

In this panel we invite all those researchers who are working in the construction of wages series that include female and/or children wages, whether sectoral, regional, national or international, and those who elaborate family budgets to present their papers proposals with the objective of sharing ideas, work methodologies and results that give more light to the evolution of living standards from a historical perspective.