People involved in the study of women's work in the Occupational Structure programme

Amy Erickson has worked with the Occupational Structure of Britain programme since 2005, and has established that the sources exist for a quantitative evaluation of women's work and a reconstruction of female occupational structure in early modern Britain. She has published research on London and more papers are in preparation. She was awarded a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant in 2016 to employ Dr Judy Stephenson in a survey of 18th-century London institutional accounts, from which an article on women contractors is forthcoming, and in 2017 to employ Dr Jacob Field to assess the male occupational structure of 17th-century London, as a necessary preliminary step to assessing the female occupational structure.

Jacob Field worked with the Occupational Structure programme from 2009-12, surveying county record offices throughout England for sources which supply consistent information on women's work, and again in 2017, to establish the male occupational structure of 17th-century London. His publications for this project include an analysis of servants in large households in rural England in the 18th and 19th centuries, which appeared in the Economic History Review in 2013, an article on the occupational structure of 17th-century Southwark, submitted to London Journal, and one on the occupation structure of Westminster in preparation.

Sophie McGeevor assessed the reliability of the 1851 census enumeration of women's work in a county study for her MPhil dissertation (published in 2014), and is currently writing her PhD thesis on Dividing the day: gender, work and time use in 18th and 19th-century Britain, using the depositions of the Old Bailey to investigate and quantify the type of activities being carried out, the location where these activities occur and any additional variables which may provide insight into the difference between male and female time allocation.

Leigh Shaw-Taylor directs the Occupational Structure of Britain programme, has published on geographical variation in female employment in 1851, and is particularly interested in mapping techniques and in the problems of modelling female labour force participation rates on a regional and national level from evidence which is necessarily local in nature.

Keith Sugden is wrote his PhD thesis on the causes of the collapse of the worsted industry in Northamptonshire and Norfolk, and its spectacular rise in the West Riding of Yorkshire, over the period 1700 and 1850, through an occupational analysis of parish records, testamentary sources and Quarter Sessions records. The geographical shifts in textile industries affected the availability of work for women, especially in spinning.

E.A. Wrigley is examining the significance of demographic change for patterns of female employment. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a relatively high age at marriage and a high proportion never marrying meant that more women spent more of their adult lives unmarried and theoretically freer to work in the 'market economy'. From the later seventeenth century, the declining average age at marriage and falling proportion of women who never married might in itself have made a significant difference to the woman-hours worked in paid employment and to the relative importance of different employments.

Xuesheng You is wrote his PhD thesis on patterns of British female employment during the second half of the nineteenth century, using local level census enumerators' books for the whole country, disaggregating employment by age, marital status, and husband's occupation. This allows, for the first time, an examination of the sub-national geography and sectoral and age composition of change over time.