As the demands of war forced a major reorganization of industry between 1914 and 1918, thousands of French and British women left their jobs as weavers, dressmakers, or domestic servants and moved into the all-male world of metalworking. In neither country, however, did the sexual division of labor simply crumble after 1914. On the contrary, over the next two decades, employers continued to uphold gender division as a central means of ordering production.

Manufacturing Inequality compares the complex historical process whereby metals employers in two distinct national and cultural settings first brought women into their factories and then reorganized work procedures and managerial structures in order to accommodate the new workforce. Drawing from an extensive range of previously untapped industrial archives, Laura Lee Downs analyzes how sexual difference was transformed from a principle for excluding women into a basis for dividing labor within the newly restructured production process. She explores the origins of wage discrimination and occupational segregation through the lens of managerial strategy, tracing the gendered redefinition of job skills, the division of the shopfloor into hierarchically ordered spaces, the deployment of women welfare supervisors, and the implementation of scientific management techniques. Through its detailed comparative analysis of employers' attitudes toward women workers, Manufacturing Inequality mounts a careful critique of both neoclassical economics and feminist dual systems frameworks for understanding gender discrimination in industry.

Laura Lee Downs is Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.