The European Social Science History Conference took place from 26-29th March 2025 in Leiden, Netherlands. Our PhD candidates Wiltrud and Klara presented about social inequalities found within our corpus of job advertisements:
Using a dataset of 10.442 manually annotated job ads, which is a subset of a larger dataset containing millions of job ads, we analyze gendered job opportunities, occupational segregation, and wage disparities, using machine-learning approaches and training custom NER-based (named entity recognition) models. Our findings highlight the significant transformation of women’s employment over this period. While early job ads predominantly featured women in domestic roles, industrialization and expanding clerical opportunities gradually shifted their labor market presence. However, legal restrictions, societal expectations, and structural barriers limited career advancement, reinforcing wage disparities. Wage data from case studies suggest that female-dominated positions remained largely low-paid, with women often classified as "secondary workers" and expected to leave the workforce upon marriage.
The results contribute to ongoing discussions about gender inequality in the workforce and suggest that understanding historical labor market dynamics is crucial to addressing modern labor market challenges.