To better understand the historical gender wage gap, we investigate the wages of Swedish compositors circa 1900 using a rich data set of matched employer-employee information with national coverage. In line with previous findings, women earned about 70 percent of men’s wages on average. Individual and job characteristics explain much of this shortfall. Firm characteristics or firm fixed effects, on average, explain 17 percent of the gap, though the firm mattered more for the gender gap in big cities than elsewhere. Sorting across firms is thus an important part of understanding historical gender wage gaps. While most studies conclude that a significant portion of the gender gap is unexplained, suggesting labor market discrimination, this may result from a lack of information on the distribution of men and women across firms.

中文翻译：

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进一步了解性别差距：世纪之交瑞典作曲家的案例

为了更好地了解历史上的性别工资差距，我们使用具有全国范围的匹配雇主-雇员信息的丰富数据集调查了大约 1900 年瑞典排字员的工资。与之前的调查结果一致，女性的平均工资约为男性的 70%。个人和工作特征在很大程度上解释了这种不足。平均而言，公司特征或公司固定效应解释了 17% 的差距，尽管公司对大城市的性别差距比其他地方更重要。因此，跨公司分类是了解历史性别工资差距的重要部分。虽然大多数研究得出的结论是，性别差距的很大一部分无法解释，这表明劳动力市场存在歧视，但这可能是由于缺乏关于公司之间男女分布的信息。