roportion of women's work is done in small factories, in workshops,
and in the home, under conditions which are inimicable to the
effective organisation of the workers. Until out-work is much
diminished, and effective inspection and limitation of hours in small
workshops drives a much larger proportion of women workers into large
factories, where closer social intercourse can lay the moral
foundation of trade organisation in mutual acquaintance, trust, and
regard, there is little prospect of women being able to raise their
"customary" wage considerably above its present subsistence level, or
to obtain any considerable alleviation of the burdensome conditions of
excessive hours of labour, insanitary surroundings, unjust fines,
etc., from which many women workers suffer.

Women cannot in most of their industries organise effectively under
present conditions. In each trade, therefore, the workers employed are
surrounded by a permanent mass of potential "black legs" willing to
take their labour from urgent need, ignorance, or thoughtlessness, and
possessing or able to attain the small skill required. In men's
industries, save in the most unskilled, there is not a constant
over-supply of labour, in most women's industries there is.

Sec. 13. Comparing women's wages with men's we are now able to sum up as
follows:--The smaller productivity of woman's work makes the possible
maximum wage lower; the smaller wants of women make the possible
minimum wage lower; the greater weakness of women as competitors,
arising chiefly from excess of supply of labour, makes their actual
wage approximate to the lower rather than to the higher level.

In regarding productivity as a measure of maximum wage it is necessary
to guard carefully against one misapprehension. So far as we are
comparing the wage of men and women engaged upon the same work, the
smaller wages of the latter may easily be seen to have some relation
to the smaller product of their labour. But when productivity is
expressed in terms of the selling value of the work no such
measurement is open to us. We are thus thrown back on market value and
are told that the reason women get so little is that what they make
fetches so low a price. But the circularity of this argument will
appear on revising the question and asking, "Why do women's products
sell so cheap?" the obvious answer being, "Because the cost of labour
in them is so little,"--_i.e._, because women receive low wages.