Why we shouldn’t measure women’s labour force participation in pre-industrial countries

ABSTRACT Labour force participation was designed to measure contemporary labour markets, and does a poor job of measuring work, particularly women’s work, in the past. When we measure labour force participation we ignore production for household use, ignore differences in the intensity of work, and assume a continuity of employment that did not characterize most historical work. Therefore, I suggest that we should not use labour force participation to measure women’s work outside of modern, industrialized societies.