uses as--

_a._ Causes relating to "productivity" or efficiency of labour.

_b._ Causes relating to "needs" or standard of comfort.

_c._ Causes relating to character and intensity of competition.

Sec. 5. _a._ Women do not on the average work so hard or so well as men,
so that if wages were paid with sole reference to quantity and quality
of the product of labour women would get less. This inferiority in the
net efficiency of women's labour is partly due to physical, partly to
social causes. The following are the leading factors in this
inferiority of efficiency:--

(1) The physical weakness of woman, as compared with man, closes many
occupations to her. In manufactures the metal industries have been
almost entirely closed to women, and most branches of the mining and
railway industries. In England and America the rougher work of
agriculture is almost wholly given over to male labour, and in several
continental countries there is a growing tendency to spare women the
kinds of labour which tax the muscular forces most severely. The
growing consideration for the duties of maternity, operating through
public opinion and legislation, favour this curtailment of woman's
sphere of activity. Further, in all employments where physical
strength is an important factor, the net productivity of woman's
labour tends to fall below man's, although in some cases superior
deftness or lightness of hand related to physical fragility may
compensate. Even in modern textile factories the superior force of
man's muscles often gives him a great advantage. In fustian and velvet
cutting, where the same piece-wages are paid to men and women, the
actual takings of the men are about double. "Every person has two long
frames upon which the cloth is stretched ready for cutting, and while
women are unable to cut more than one piece at a time, men can cut two
pieces without difficulty."[246]

Where physical strength is not a prime factor it may enter
incidentally. So even in weaving women are under some disadvantage
through inability to work the heavy Jacquard looms, and to "tune"
their looms.[247]

Where manual work is concerned brute strength and endurance form an
important ingredient in what is called manual skill, and affect the
quality of the work as well as the pace and regularity of the output.
Though, as we have seen, a chief object of modern machinery is to
diminish the importance of this element, it plays no inconsiderable
part in af