Business and gender in Spain (19th-20th centuries):A long period of cheap women´s services outsourcingLina Gálvez Muñoz (Carlos III University) and Paloma Fernández Pérez (University of Barcelona)1

“During many centuries economic activity relied greatly on the creativity of the most audatious men who created around them centres of work, firms, original projects they offered to the society in which they were born or where they had come to from other countries. This reality has been overcome and today we live an era of full incorporation of women to the labour market either as workers or as entrepreneurs”.

(Rodrigo Rato, former Spanish Minister of Economy and current President of the IMF)2

I. Introduction:One wonders whether the “creativity of the most audatious men”

could be the basic factor that may explain Spanish business history during the last two centuries. Many economic and business historians trained in Marxist and neoclassical traditions would doubtlessly include other agents that have been fundamental in such history –like unions, policy makers, bankers, international institutions, business groups and networks-. Less often we find among these economic agents women. Were they totally absent from business activity and economic life? The answer is no. Not only because there are exceptional individual cases, both in the past, such as Beatriz de Sampayo, royal banker in 17th century Spain, and in the present, as Ana Patricia Botín from the Santander Group, but also, as we will demonstrate, because they have been everywhere, especially providing services within firms. The aim of this paper will be first, to provide an approach to Spanish business history from a gender perspective. And second, to show that women´s economic activity has especialized in the cheap or free provision of services, which were more important than it is recognised for explaining the rise and consolidation of modern business.

Women have always been present in business activity, but only very recently they have been as such in academic analysis, thanks to the incorporation of gender as a main analytical tool, questioning concepts, 1 We would like to thank Patricio Sáiz and Carlos Álvarez Nogal for letting us use information on female patents and female bankers respectively, from non-published work.. P. Fernández has benefitted for this work from a grant of the II Convocatoria de Ayudas a la Investigación de la Fundación Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (2003).2 R. Rato (2993), “Prólogo” to Cien empresarias. Testimonios de cien mujeres que lo han conseguido. Madrid, JdeJ Editores, p.9

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sources and theories. One of them could be the classification of economic activity in sectors which constitutes the basis for most accepted theories of economic development and structural change that identify growth with industrialization. These theories usually do not indicate that industry brought about tertiarization of the secondary sector before the service sector became dominant in most Western economies in terms of employment and GDP. The ordering of society according to gender greatly influenced the tertiarization process of the industrial sector and the consolidation of the capitalist firm in the Western world. According to Claudia Goldin, gender is today declining as a an ordering element of the economic life, but a century ago its importance was growing.3 In fact, during the first industrial divide the new professions and jobs were designed or consolidated as male or female, and production, technology, wages and the capitalist firms in general were organised using gender differences in society4. In this division, women continued to basically provide services for the household, the family business and the new firms. 5

Women´s specialization in providing services did not imply a change in law and tradition regarding women´s recognition of their work. Most of the services they provided within family businesses were done for free, without contracts, without social benefits. Nevertheless, the experience these women acquired trained them and created human capital at a low cost for the local and national governments. Low cost of women´s services must not related to productivity reasons, as memories of entrepreneurs and records from private firms indicate. Rather, it has to be related to the performance of dead-end jobs in which promotion was not contemplated

3 Claudia Goldin (2002), The rising and declining of the significance of gender. NBER (WP) 8915, 2002.4 The organization of production and the election of a specific technique by firms during the rising of corporate business was not independent from gender. Research at firm-level supports and enlarges this general interpretation. See the studies of Kenneth Lipartito (1994), “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920”, American Historical Review, Oct., pp.1075-1111; Lina Gálvez Muñoz (1999) “Labour Organisation and the Modernisation of Spanish Tobacco Industry” in E. Benenatti (ed.), Impresa e Lavoro di Stato: La Manifattura tabacchi fra ottocento e novecento, Torino, Trauben; and (2000) “Género y Cambio Tecnológico: Rentabilidad Económica y Rentabilidad Política de la Gestión Privada del Monopolio de Tabacos, 1887-1945”, Revista de Historia Económica, 2000, 1, pp.11-45.5 Changes in women status over time determined family firm behavior and strategies that contributed to differentiate family firms across regions and countries. Often back into the 18th and 19th centuries the services they provided were often imposed and very rarely oposed in big family firms, as the case of the González Byas family demonstrate. See Colli, A., Fernández Pérez, P. And Rose, M. “National determinants of family firm development? Family firms in Britain, Spain and Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries”, Enterprise and Society, March 2003, vol.4, n.1, 28-64.

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and were therefore jobs men rarely would accept to enter according to what society expected from them, as the enshrined bread-winners.6

Because in Spain the big corporate firms were exceptional, the huge and visible demand for new jobs they created in other countries like Germany or the US, simply did not exist.7 Instead, most Spanish firms were SMEs owned by families with an autocratic and personalistic style of management in which blood ties with male relatives was the first criteria for promotion to top managerial positions and ownership and in which loyalty and not meritocracy often served as the basic criteria for stability and improvement in the working place. In Spain, most of these services provided by women outside firms and within family firms remained unrecorded and unpaid in official statistics, yet they slowly created human capital that the Spanish economic system will only fully use during the second half of the 20th century, when after the end of the Franco’s dictatorship Spain rapidly reduced the economic and political gap which it has had for two centuries with its European neighbours. Finally, from 1975, women did not need any more by law to ask their husbands for permission to open a business, ask for credits, sign a legal document, or to move to another city.

In order to answer the questions asked in this introduction, this paper is divided in three main parts. A revision of the main theoretical concepts and approaches is the focus of the first section of the paper in which newinstitutional and evolutionary approaches are presented as the 6 On the male breadwinner family model see the special number edited by Angelique Janssens (1997),(Ed.), The rise and decline of the male bredwinner family, International Journal of Social History, 17, December. The statistical discrimination theory would apply to this interpretation and it was developed by Kenneth Arrow, (1973), “The Theory of Discrimination”, in Orley Ashenfelter and Albert Rees, eds, Discrimination in Labour Markets, Princenton, Princenton University Press and a new more sophisticated and complete version in Claudia Goldin (2002) “Pollution theory of discrimination: Male and Female differences in occupations and earnings”, NBER, WP, 8985. Another interesting model is the Over-crowding model developed by Barbara Bergmann (1996), In Defense of Affirmative Action. New York, Basic Books. In this model women received as average lower wages than men and had worse conditions in firms, because the sectors and jobs opened to them are limited and as a matter of fact, there is an excess of female supply in those limited sectors that pushes down wages and working conditions. 7 About the weak demand of female jobs in the new economic sectors, see Mary Nash (1983), Mujer, Familia y Trabajo en España, 1875-1936, Anthropos, Barcelona. On the difficulties to have big firms in Spain, see Albert Carreras and Xavier Tafunell (1997), “Spain: Big manufacturing firms between State and Market, 1917-1990” Chandler, A., Amatori, F., and Hichino, T. (Eds.), Big Business and the Wealth of Nations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. On the relation among firm size and management style, see Mauro Guillén (1994), Models of Management. Work, authority and organization in a comparative perspective, Chicago University Press, Chicago, and just for the Spanish case, Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2001), “Contamos Trabajadores o Contamos con los Trabajadores. Trabajo y Empresa en la España Contemporánea” Revista de Historia Económica, número extraordinario, Los Novísimos en la Historia Económica en España, pp. 201-227.

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best theoretical frameworks for including gender in business history. The second part deals with institutional framework that shaped, limited and influenced women entrepreneurial activity in Spain from late early modern times until nowadays. Finally, the last section indicates the specialization of such activity in providing services within and outside the firm at a low cost for firms and governments -and at a high cost for women. Institutional factors that conditioned different access to education, finance, salaried work, property management, and politics together with quantitative and qualitative data about women in business will lead to criticize mainstream theories about economic and business development.

II. A critical approach to theories and sources in business history from a gender perspetive

II.1. From neoclassical concepts to a gendered business history

Traditional neoclassical approaches to economic and business history are based on rational choice and the existence of a perfect knowledge of information held by the economic agents.8 For some neoclassical and Keynesian thinkers after the II WW and right until the 1960s the importance of the State and capital investment in economic growth contributed to create indifference even around the figure of the entrepreneur regardless gender definitions.9 Neoclassical and Keynesian premises in themselves deny the existence of women as economic agents because, to begin with, and with the exception of some countries, in general there is no perfect quantitative information about their activities, and frequently no information at all because of the sources in themselves but also because of the questions researchers have traditionally addressed to these sources.10 Newinstitutional and evolutionary approaches have criticized the rational choice and perfect information premises for

8 A critical approach to neoclassic theories for business history in M. Casson and M. B . Rose, eds. (1997), Institutions and the Evolution of Modern Business. Frank Cass, London. Also the classical text by the most influential theorists of evolutionary economics, R. Nelson y S. Winter (1982) An evolutionary theory of economic change. Belknap Press, Cambridge Massachussets. 9 J.Ma. Valdaliso and S. López (2000), Historia económica de la empresa. Crítica, Barcelona, p. 18.10 Works by Wendy Gamber, Kathy Peiss and Joan Scott in “Gender and Business History” in Business History Review 72 (Summer 1998), pp. 185-249. Joan Scott (1988), Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, New York

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entrepreneurship and have underlined the importance of information costs, transaction costs, and path-dependence concepts in the development of entrepreneurship. R.O. Coase, and O. Williamson contributed to spread the idea that to operate in the market economic agents need to reduce the costs related to the exchange of information and the operations required to seal transactions.11 Ideas from E. Penrose, R. Nelson and Winter recognize that firms change their competitive advantages in front of changes that take place in the environment where they operate (technology, markets, competitors). In a short overview about the implications of new institutional studies for business studies, Mary B. Rose has argued that theoretical work with this perspective has highlighted either convergence or divergence: some studies have indicated paths of development in a country or economic sector that other countries or sectors would try to imitate (à la Chandler), and other studies emphasize the divergent paths of development that have led to different models of growth.12

U.S. and some European business and economic historians, particularly A. Kwolek-Fowland, M. Yeager, M. Nash, M.Walsh, L. Gálvez, K. Honeyman, C. Borderías, L. Andersson-Skog, and C. Sarasúa, have applied some of these concepts to the study of women´s activity, demonstrating that women particularly before the information revolution did not have equal access to information about the market compared to men´s, which influenced their differential economic behaviours. Among accepted reasons that explain such differential information we do have the fact that women had different access to property, education, business formal and informal clubs and associations, legal recognition of their economic activities, legal services and protection, and credit, among other key elements that allowed entrepreneurs the development of business activities. The information and the social and legal framework women entrepreneurs had were therefore restricted, and conditioned the sort of business they could develop.

On another ground, influential studies about innovation and growth from A.D. Chandler Jr., who followed the transaction cost theory of Coase

11 R. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica, 1937, pp. 386-485; O.E. Williamson, “The Modern Corporation: Origins, Evolution, Attributes”, Journal of Economic Literature, 1981, 19, pp. 1537-1568.12 Mary B. Rose, “Networks, Values and Business: the Evolution of British Family Firms from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century”, Entreprises et Historie, 1999,no.22,pp. 16-20. Also see Sverre Knutsen, Mary B.Rose and Hans Sjögren, “Introduction” to the special issue “Institutions and Business” published in the Scandinavian Economic History Review, 199, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 5-9.

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and Williamson, have focused on the dynamic interaction between the innovative growth strategies of firms pursuing economies of scale and scope and the development of professionally managed hierarchical structures in the United States. Using and critizing Chandler´s framework, W. Lazonick emphasized that in Britain high levels of specialization and on labour relations served as obstacles to innovation in the twentieth century.13 In both cases Chandler and Lazonick focused on industrial activity and in proprietary industrial capitalism respectively, which vastly excluded services and non-proprietary capitalism. However, services and non-proprietary entrepreneurship are precisely the two areas which according to available studies constituted the dominant specialties of women´s participation in economic life, in Spain as it seems to have been the case in the rest of the Western world.14

Lazonick´s works contain, however, two arguments that have great potential to include such specialties.15 First, Lazonick outlines the importance of work and innovation in the shop-floor in front of the Chandlerian insistence of managers as main agents of innovation in the firm. A gender reading about the implications for business history of such ideas are that workers matter and that innovation can be produced from bottom to top –not always in the opposite way. In addition, for Lazonic, the SCIE (social conditions of innovative enterprise) lies on industrial conditions (technology/ market/ competitive), organizational conditions (cognigtive/ behavioural and strategic), and institutional conditions (employment, financial and regulatory). Again, a gender reading of such assumptions applied to business history would reinforce Galambos´and Granovetter´s theories about the diversity that firms, organizational routines, business strategies, financial choices may adopt in different environments and business groups. Thus, employment institutions and family groupings in highly personalistic societies determine how a society develops the capabilities of its present and future labor forces, including

13 R. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica, 1937, pp. 386-485; O.E. Williamson, “The Modern Corporation: Origins, Evolution, Attributes”, Journal of Economic Literature, 1981, 19, pp. 1537-1568; Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Scale and Scope, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1990; William Lazonick, Business Organization and the Mith of the Market Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.14 A.Kwolek-Fowland (1998) Incorporating Women. A History of Women and Business in the United States, Twayne Publishers, New York15 William Lazonick (2003), “Understanding Innovative Enterprise: Toward the Integration of Economic Theory and Business History”, in Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones (eds), Business History Around the World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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education, research, and training systems. Also, how it structures the availability of employment and the conditions of work and remuneration. Female entrepreneurs face common problems with female workers as well as other specific to them which are also discriminatory. In many Western countries until after the II WW civil codes forbade women to own any business, to be masters of guilds or had an individual access to finance -mainly reserved to men. Regulatory institutions determine how a society assigns rights and responsibilities to different groups of people over the management of society´s productive resources and how it imposes restrictions on the development and utilization of these resources. Institutional, organizational and industrial conditions interact historically to determine a unique set of rights, responsibilities and restrictions that characterize a particular economy and society in a particular era.

L. Galambos, one of the most influential theorists about innovation in business history has emphasized and outlined the relevance of networks of public, private and non-profit institutions in sustaining innovation in science-based, high-tech companies. The idea about the relevance of networks of institutions for businesses has been broadened by a school of sociologists to define more diverse elements that compose business groups. M. Granovetter and R. Swedberg have defined in a broad way the informal and formal networks influential in the creation of business groups regardless the economic sector and technological content. According to Granovetter and Swedberg and the network analysis theorists business networks can be composed of individuals linked by religion, ethnicity, politics, culture, and kinship. The common key element in all of them is that they base business in high-trust relationships in societies with a high personalistic component, which helps reduce transaction costs. 16

Applications of such ideas to business history have provided several analysis about family firms across sectors and territories, and have allowed a critical reappraisal of the family firm in economic and business theories.17

16 Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, The Sociology of Economic Life, Boulder, Westview Press, 199217 M. Casson (1999), “The Economics of the Family Firm”, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 47, pp. 10-23. A. Colli, P. Fernández Pérez, M.B. Rose (2003) “National Determinants of Family Firm Development? Family Firms in Britain, Spain, and Italy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, Enterprise&Society 4 (March 2003): 20-64. P. Fernández Pérez (2003) “Reinstalando la empresa familiar en la Economía y la Historia económica. Una aproximación a debates recientes”, Cuadernos de Economía y Dirección de la Empresa, 17, oct.dic.2003, 45-66.

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A critical reading of these ideas would lead to a central question in business history: could we apply gender to understand and explain entrepreneurship? Relatively recent work in business history is trying to be at the crossroads of these contributions from new institutionalists, evolutionary theorists and sociologists. A. Kwolek-Fowland or M. Walsh for the U.S., Evridiki Sifneos for Greece, Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen for Finland, M.E. Wiesner for Germany have written with these new perspectives about the world of services, and the world of non-proprietary capitalism, with a gender perspective that has allowed the inclusion of different forms of entrepreneurship historiography has undersestimated: women´s entrepreneurship.18 Some of the implications of these works are to reconsider classical theories about economic development, like the theory about the tertiarization of the economy in the western world. According to these new studies influenced by new institutionalism, sociology, and gender studies, women´s massive specialization in economic life has been in the service sector. The consequences of such observation are important doubtlessly: the dominance of the tertiary sector in the economy would have taken place much earlier than we believe, by taking statistics with a gender approach.

II.2. The tertiarization of the Spanish economy with a gender approachThe classical theory about tertiary activities can be traced back to

the 1930s, when the economic crisis and the related mass unemployment of that time demanded solutions, to what it was considered not a temporary phenomenon but an structural crisis. This idea led to a growing interest in economic structure, both in research and in politics. The clasification of the economic activity in three different sectors was developed in the 1930s 19. 18 M. Walsh, “Making Connections Between Gender and Business Histories”, 6th EBHA Annual Conference in Helsinki, August 2002. A. Kwolek-Fowland, Incorporating Women. A History of Women and Business in the United States (1998), Twayne Publishers, New York. M. E. Wiesner (1990) “¿Buhoneras insignificantes o mercaderes esenciale? Las mujeres, el comercio y los servicios en Nuremberg durante la Edad Moderna” in J.Amelang and Mary Nash,eds. Historia y Género: Las mujeres en la Europa moderna y contemporànea. Edicions Alfons el Magnànim-Institució Valenciana d´Estudis i Investigació, 177-189. E.Sifneos (2002), “Businessmen wives and family firms: evidence from family records of the Greek business networks of the Eastern Mediterranean in the late 19th century”, 6th EBHA Annual Conference, Helsinki, August 2002. K. Vainio-Forhonen (2002), “Food, Clothes and Care-Finnish Female Entrepreneurs from 1750 to 2000”, 6th EBHA Annual Conference in Helsinki, August 2002. See also articles collected by Mary A. Yeager (1999) (Ed.) Women in Business, 3vols. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.19 H. Van Dij (1998), “Industrial decline and the development of the Service Economy”, in M. Hau, ed., De-industrialisation in Europe, 19th-20th centuries. Proceedings of the 12th International Economic History Congress, Madrid, August 1998. Fundación Fomento de la Historia Económica, Madrid, p. 25.

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This classification was inspired in the utility of the goods produced: absolutely essentials –primary sector-; no longer essential –secondary sector-; and even less essential -tertiary sector-, a sector characterized by lack of regulation, scarce remuneration and feminization–.20 Few years later, it was added to that explanation the idea that it was the possibility or impossibility to increase production which was the crucial difference. The causes of this could be found in the increased application of technology.21

But not all sectors receive the same impact from technological progress and growth. Agriculture would have a limited increase, industry can increase production to an almost unlimited extent. And tertiary activites could be influenced by technological change but in a rather limited way. Of course, within this theory is was contended a theory of economic development as a serie of stages dominated by an economic sector or activity.

Nowadays, it is clear that services can be affected by technology in a really deep manner as computerization and internet have showed. Also that, as a result of the continuing division of labor, many activities no longer contribute directly to the realization of a particular product due to the increased practice of service outsourcing. Some of the consequences of these changes are that many people counted within industry will be in fact providing services within industrial firms. If we accept this argument then the tertiary sector already started to grow in Western Europe before the Second World War and not, as is generally assumed, after that event.22 The provision of services within firms would, thus, be essential in explaining the development of corporate capitalism, and because women played an essential role in servicing the industry from within and from the outside women´s role in the tertiarization of the economy would have been. The conclusion would be that female did play an essential and not always visible role on that development. Specially in countries such as Spain charactised by the predominance of SMEs mainly family runned.

Services are very heterogeneous and normally are divided between producer-oriented services and social services –which are supposed to be provided by the public administrations at least in welfare state countries.

20 A.G.B. Fisher (1933), “Capital and the Growth of Knowledge”, The Economic Journal. C. Clark (1940), The Conditions of Economic Progress,London.21 J. Fourastié (1949), Le grand espoir du Xxe siècle. Progrès technique, progrès économique, progrès sociale. Paris.22 Van Dijk (1998), p. 23.

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Both were within business performed mainly by female, especially within family business. Still many of these services that in some countries were suposed to be provided by public institutions were in fact provided by women within the family. This reality helps explain that in some countries like Spain where the welfare state was not developed after the Second World War, and only pseudo-built up from the late 1970s, the conciliation between “family and work” in the period of rising official female occupation rates has provoked an important decline in fertility rates, up to the botton of the world fertility index.23

According to the classical theory of the 1930s, structural change from an agricultural society to a industrial society had a different path in the different Western countries. England would have been first, to be followed by the first comers and then, the late comers, among them Spain. In two recent works in Spanish economic historiography -Jordi Nadal´s Atlas of Spanish Industrialisation and Leandro Prados´ long-run economic growth- the structural change is dated for Spain in the 1960s when a deep urbanization process that was already active since the late nineteenth century took place which helped the shift of the economic activity of the majority of the population.24 However, it was also in those years, especially since the 1970s when another structural change in Western Europe and the US was taking place known as post-industrialism, which was accompanied by a increasing share of the service sector in the total active population in those economies. By 1970 the tertiary sector had in Western Europe a 43.1% of total active population, while the secondary sector had a 41.0. However, by 1980 the secondary sector had dropped to 18.7 and the tertiary increased to 55,8.25 How was Spain in this picture?

Spain has increased its active population in both industrial and services sectors along the twentieth century, except in the last third when the industrial sector has been declining as in other Western economies, and the services sector has increased its growth in a sustained way. For many economists and polititians this post-1960s tertiarization would

23 Carmen Sarasúa and Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2003), “Mujeres y Hombres en los mercados de trabajo. ¿Privilegios o Eficiencia?” in Carmen Sarasúa and Lina Gálvez Muñoz (Eds) ¿Privilegios o Eficiencia? Mujeres y Hombres en los Mercados de Trabajo, Alicante, Universidad de Alicante.24 L. Prados de la Escosura (2003), El progreso económico de España 1850-2000. Fundación BBVA, Madrid. J. Nadal, dir. (2003), Atlas de la industrialización de España 1750-2000. Fundación BBVA-Crítica, Barcelona, pp.20-21.25 Van Dijk (1998), p.24.

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indicate the final process of modernization of the Spanish economy. Tourism, banking, transport and commerce, and the increasing size of services in the public sector all would have contributed to the modernization of Spain, through a bigger share of the tertiary sector.26 The figures used to draw this picture for Spain, however, present some doubts. A recent elaboration by Prados has tried with difficulties to present data about added value for the services in Spain since 1850, though in some branches like domestic services where women were dominant only information about employment and salaries are available.

An alternative to estimate in the long run the importance of services in the Spanish economy is through activity rates by sector, gathered by Prados regardless gender distinctions, which show employment in the services sector has always been greater than employment in industry, from 1850 to 2000. If we look at the composition of the services sector it is astonishing according to Prados´ figures that since 1850 up until the IWW the added value of the domestic services was similar or above that of the banking and insurance services. In 1913 net added value of the banking and insurance services was 2.3 per cent of total added value of Spanish services, whereas that for domestic services was 3.0 per cent that year. In 1929 the added value was respectively 4.6 per cent and 3.0 per cent. In 1958 8.6 per cent and 4.2 per cent. Despite the problems in elaborating and comparing these percentages, they demonstrate the macroeconomic relevance of activities in which women were especialized.27

The contribution of the female labour force (either as workers or self-employed) to the increase of services in Spain during the urbanization and industrialization processes, cannot be underestimated. The aggregate data show clearly the role played by women in this shift, as it is possible to observe in the following tables for more recent times -though Spanish female activity rates over the female total potential active population had been the lowest in OECD countries. According to available statistics –censuses and the EPA (Encuesta de Población Activa)- for this country since 1950 women have mainly concentrated activity in the services sector, representing around 30 per cent of total employment in this sector until 1980. From this time onwards the increase was spectacular until the 26 L. Prados de la Escosura (2003), El progreso económico de España, 1850-2000. Fundación BBVA, Madrid.27 L. Prados (2003), pp. 75-76 and 83-84 According to Prados the figures for services come from added value data except for domestic services which come from employment data.

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almost 51 per cent in the services sector in 2003. In addition, the services is by far the most important provider to Spanish GDP and total employment –has been, if we look at the tables and the corresponding sources. The process has speeded up and female are responsible for the 62,5 per cent of the growth in employment in the sector, for the whole period between 1980 and 2003. However, its contribution to the growth of the service sector in Spain started to be essential only since the 1970s, and specially from the 1980s onwards with the globalization process and the opening of Spanish economy to Europe and the world economy.

It is commonly admitted that female visibility in census data starts only with the process of division of labour and especialization which is very much related with the industrialization, firm size or the development of civil service. Women were present before but unrecorded. However, they already specialised in services as the microdata shows. Structural change in an economy affects either female activity or its recording in official censuses, according to A. Mata Greenwood. This is consistent with the U-shaped analysis of long-run female activity rates in which the bottom part of the U would belong to the “industrialization” or structural change of a traditional agrarian economy, whereas the rising side of the U would correspond to the “tertiarization” in its classical 1930s definition.28The modernisation of the Spanish economy and the growth of its active population is very much related with the process of terziarization and the feminization of the service sector.

Own Elaboration. Source: L. Prados de la Escosura (2003), El progreso económico de España, 1850-2000. Fundación BBVA, Madrid.

28 C. Goldin (1990), Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women.Oxford University Press, New York. A. Mata Greenwood (2001), “Gender Issues in Labour Statistics” in M. Fetherolf Loutfi,ed., Women, Gender and Work. What is equality and how do we get there. International Labour Office, Geneva, pp.69-83.

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Table 1. Women in Workforce International Comparisons, 1950-2001 (in %). Female active population over total female potential active population (women aged 16-65)

1950 1960 1969 1979 1989 2001

France 34.1 33.4 47.6 53.5 56.2 61.8

Germany n.a. 37.0 48.0 49.6 54.8 63.8

Greece 18.0 32.8 31.2 32.8 43.5 488

Ireland 26.3 26.2 34.6 35.2 37.5 56.0

Italy 25.5 24.9 33.6 37.6 44.3 47.3

Japan n.a. n.a. 55.6 54.7 59.3 60.1

Netherlands 24.4 22.3 n.a. 33.4 51.0 66.9

Portugal 22.4 17.7 27.2 57.0 59.7 64.6

Spain 15.8 20.1 29.2 32.6 39.9 51.6

Sweden 29.7 29.8 57.8 72.8 80.5 77.1

United Kingdom n.a. 32.4 50.4 58.0 65.4 67.6

United States 27.5 32.1 48.2 58.9 68.1 70.5Own elaboration. Sources: 1950 & 1960 (UN Historical Statistics). 1969-2001 (OECD Labour Statistics Bulletin). All years are no t coincident for all countries especially in the early decades. Year should be taken as “circa”.

Own Elaboration. Source: L. Prados de la Escosura (2003), El progreso económico de España, 1850-2000. Fundación BBVA, Madrid.

Table 2. Evolution of employment in Spain over the 20th century. By sector and by gender

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2.a 1900-1910(in thousands)1900 1910Total Male Female % female Total Male Female % female

Agriculture, hunting and fishing

4558,3 3782,6 775,5 17,01 4220,5 3861,1 359,4 8,51

Total agricult.4558,3 3782,6 775,5 17,01 4220,5 3861,1 359,4 8,51

Mining 76,2 75,6 0,6 0,78 90,8 90,7 0,1 0,11

Industry706,

4 532,1 174,3 24,67 739,9 563,4 176,5 23,85

total industry782,

6 607,7 174,9 22,34 830,7 654,1 176,6 21,25Construction 236 235,7 0,3 0,12 243,5 243,3 0,2 0,08total construction 236 235,7 0,3 0,12 243,5 243,3 0,2 0,08Utilities 7,5 7,3 0,2 2,66 10,5 10,5 0 0

Commerce230,

7 204,1 26,6 11,53 252,4 227,6 24,8 9,82

Other services912,

6 579,2 333,4 36,53 1081,4 663,9 417,5 38,60

total services1150,8 790,6 360,2 31,29 1344,3 902 442,3 32,90

Not specified819,

1 747,6 71,5 8,72 1005,5 896,4 109,1 10,85

Total7546,8 6164,2 1382,6 18,32 7581,5 6556,9 1024,6 13,51

2b 1920-1930 (in thousands)1920 1930Total Male Female % female Total Male Female % female

Agriculture, hunting and fishing

4555,6 4232,8 322,8 7,08 3936,8 3849 168  4,26

Total agricult.4555,6 4232,8 322,8 7,08 3936,8 3849 168 4,26

Mining132,

2 130 2,2 1,66 113,5 114,4 0,4 0,35

Industry1324

,1 1046,3 277,8 20,98 2357 1628 729 30,92

total industry1456,3 1176,3 280 19,22 2470,5 1742,4 729,4 29,52

Construction216,

3 216,1 0,2 0,09 284,9 282,9 2 0,70

total construction216,

3 216,1 0,2 0,09 284,9 282,9 2 0,70Utilities 21,7 21 0,7 3,22 23,7 23 0,7 2,95

Commerce385,

1 329,6 55,5 14,41 469,5 445,3 24,2 5,15

Other services1065

,1 712,6 352,5 33,09 1388,9 925,9 463 33,33

total services1471,9 1063,2 408,7 27,76 1882,1 1394,2 487,9 25,92

Not specified262,

3 242 20,3 7,73 199,5 193,6 5,9 2,95

Total7962,4 6930,4 1032 12,96 8773,8 7462,1 1393,2 15,87

2c 1940-1950(in thousands)1940 1950

Total Male Female % female Total Male Female % femaleAgriculture, hunting and fishing 4781 4518,9 262,1 5,48 5271 4853,2 417,8 7,92Total agricult. 4781 4518,9 262,1 5,48 5271 4853,2 417,8 7,92Mining 99,6 99,1 0,5 0,50 173,8 170,6 3,2 1,84Industry 1695 1392,1 302,9 17,87 1904 1488,2 415,8 21,83

total industry1794,

6 1491,2 303,4 16,90 2077,8 1658,8 419 20,16Construction 373,4 371,7 1,7 0,45 574,3 570 4,3 0,74

14

total construction 373,4 371,7 1,7 0,45 574,3 570 4,3 0,74Utilities 44 37,6 6,4 14,54 56,5 54,7 1,8 3,1Commerce 589 518 71 12,05 697,7 594,4 103,3 14,80

Other services1626,

8 1154,8 472 29,01 1.943,8 11.201,4 742,4 38,19

total services2259,

8 1710,4 549,4 24,31 2.698 1.850,5 847,5 31,41Not specified 10,9 10,9 0 0 172 151,7 20,3 11,80

Total9219,

7 8103,1 1116,6 12,11 10.793,1 9.084,2 1.708,9 15,83

2d 1960-1970(in thousands)1960 1970

Total Male Female % female Total Male Female % femaleAgriculture, hunting and fishing 4696,4 4114,9 581,5 12,38 2958,7 2646,3 312,4 10,55

Total agricult.4696,

44114,

9 581,5 12,38 2958,7 2646,3 312,4 10,55Mining 193,8 190,9 2,9 1,49 125,8 123,7 2,1 1,66Industry 2379,2 1844,3 534,9 22,48 3019,8 2322,5 697,3 23,09

total industry 25732035,

2 537,8 20,90 3145,6 2446,2 699,4 22,23Construction 751 743,2 7,8 1,03 1217,1 1195,6 21,5 1,76total construction 751 743,2 7,8 1,03 1217,1 1195,6 21,5 1,76Utilities 63,2 60,9 2,3 3,63 86,5 82 4,5 5,20Commerce 941,7 764,8 176,9 18,78 1522,2 1106 416,2 27,34Other services 2248,2 1463,2 785 34,91 2820,6 1971,6 849 30,09

total services3253,

12288,

9 964,2 29,63 4429,3 3159,6 1269,7 28,66Not specified 543,1 254,6 288,5 53,12 157 126 31 19,74

Total11816

,69436,

8 2379,8 20,13 11908 9574 2334 19,60

2e 1981-1991(in thousands)1981 1991

Total Male Female % female Total Male Female % femaleAgriculture, hunting and fishing    

Total agricult.2054,

81514,

4 540,4 26,29 1267,8 940,7 327,1 25,80Mining  Industry    

total industry3024,

72414,

6 610,1 20,17 2986,1 2329 657,1 22,00Construction    

total construction1031,

41008,

1 23,3 2,25 1329,8 1286,9 42,9 3,22Utilities    Commerce    Other services    

total services5396,

93382,

2 2014,7 37,33 7431,5 4272,7 3158,8 42,50Not specified    

Total11581

,18368,

3 3212,8 27,74 13015,1 8829,2 4185,9 32,16

2f 2001-2004(in thousands)2001 2004

Total Male Female % female total Male Female %femaleAgriculture, hunting and fishing    Total agricult. 1007, 749,7 257,6 25,575853 964,4 695,1 269,3 27,92409

15

2 85 788Mining    Industry    

total industry3151,

32377,

1 774,224,567638

75 3072,8 2313,7 759,124,70385

316Construction    

total construction1891,

3 1800 91,34,8273674

19 2008,7 1894,3 114,45,695225

768Utilities    Commerce    Other services    

total services10071

,25182,

6 4888,648,540392

41 10806,6 5387,5 5419,150,14620

695Not specified    

Total 1612110109

,3 6011,737,291110

97 16852,5 10290,6 6561,938,93724

967

Own elaboration. Data from census and EPA from 1981

The contribution seems to be even greater and earlier from a micro and business level. We have to take into consideration, first, the hetereogeneity of the service sector and that a society with the largest percentage of active population employed in this sector does not mechanically reflect a more economically developed country –in fact, Spain shows a large proportion of service sector workers before the accomplishement of the structural change. Second, due to the specialization of labour many jobs which are counted as secondary sector jobs should rather be considered belonging to the services sector. And third, sources are not very reliable especially by considering the unrecorded importance of unpaid services within family firms and the long period of cheap women´s service outsourcing in these firms. Notarial records, tax registers, and private business archives approached with gender lenses start to provide examples of women (sisters, wives, daughters, widows) who did the accounting of small family firms, managed the education of the younger generation to succeed in the family firm, took care of the health of the members of the family firm, and led human resources manageurial tasks without formally being identified as partners of the family firm. A reading of last wills have indicated that in commercial cities where men were frequently absent in long-distance travels women could appear in local sources, informally and temporarily until men´s return, the managers of the firm at all purposes.29 Family business thus

29 P. Fernández Pérez (1997), El rostro familiar de la metrópoli. Redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Cádiz, 1700-1812. Siglo XXI, Madrid. Also from same autor (1996) “Mujeres y burguesía en el Cádiz del siglo XVIII” in L.M. Enciso Recio, La burguesía española en la edad moderna. Actas del congreso internacional celebrado en Madrid y Soria los días 16 a 18 de diciembe de 1991. Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valladolid-

16

constitute a particularly good platform from which to obtain examples of women as providers of key services to firms, from early modern times until our days. Services within family firms in the countryside, in shops, workshops, small factories, markets, tourist facilities, and other myriad of low-technology firms trained women at a low cost during more than two centuries in Spain. Our contention is that in this process Spain slowly accumulated human capital that would only be spectacularly visible from the 1970s onwards, when women´s work under contract, salary, or forming enterprises started to reveal the accumulated abilities of previous women´s business and economic activity. This process affected not just services but all economic sectors due to the spread practice of pluriactivity. 30 Besides, the progress of urbanization and industrialization in Spain during the 19th

and 20th centuries increased the demand for services, whose relevance to industry was great and took place much earlier than the period considered of strong structural change and tertiarization of the last third of the 20th

century. Aggregate figures of employment in the services since 1850 by Prados show that up until the I WW domestic service was a major branch of services, with added value growth rates which during this period sometimes went above those of the banking and insurance services in Spain. And domestic services were one of the specialized arena of women´s business activity either as workers, self-employed or entrepreneurs.

Economic growth and industrialization took place in Spain in close relationship with a long period of cheap women´s services outsourcing. This relationship is not well described in macroeconomic data, despite official census statistics do provide useful indications, as we have revealed. To study further the links between these processes we must use alternative concepts and theories to ask different questions to sources, old and new.

Fundación Duques de Soria, Valladolid, pp.280-298. See also for 16th century Seville, Mary Elisabeth Perry (1990), Gender and disorder in early modern Seville, Princenton University Press, Princenton30 In Spain, there are interesting studies on pluriactivity, mainly in rural areas, but also in industrial areas like the Basque country. See Pilar Pérez-Fuentes Hernández (2003), in Carmen Sarasúa and Lina Gálvez (2003), eds., ¿Privilegios o Eficiencia? Mujeres y hombres en los mercados de trabajo. Publicaciones Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, pp.189-216. On Pluriactivity in rural areas, José Ramón Moreno Fernández (2001), “Las áreas rurales de montaña en la España del siglo XVIII: el caso de las sierras del sur de La Rioja” Revista de Historia Económica, número extraordinario, Los Novísimos en la Historia Económica en España, pp. 61-84.

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II.3. Business history and gender: a problem of sourcesTo study business history with a gender perspective is, to start with,

a problem of sources. For the period between the 18th and the 21sth century there are a few sources that have been used with success. For all this long period, we should highlight religious and family archives, notarial records, charitable and solidarious institutions, patent registers and censuses. We do also have local sources on landownership and management of agricultural properties, and commercial “Anuarios” or yearly books that registered firms in all the country for advertising purposes. Basically only for the 19th century, another source with useful information is the “matrículas industriales y comerciales” or industrial and comercial register which had tax purposes, and in the municipal archives they provide names of artisans, manufacturers, retailers and merchants, that can be crossed with municipal censuses to have a view of local networks of entrepreneurs. For the years between the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21rst, Spanish institutions provide abundant data from private and public organizations, often through their web pages or publications, with statistics about economic activity, demography, and associations.

Sources from religious institutions such as convents have provided data on management of properties, often in urban settings, by nuns. On the other hand, and despite problems to use isolated cases to have general views, divorce demands preserved by the Archbishopric have provided empirical information about women´s resistance and opposition to socially accepted ideas about property management.31 One extensive study of the divorce demands contained in the historical archive of the Cádiz archbishopric and the Granada Audience during the eighteenth century has consistently demonstrated how working and elite women used religious institutions to preserve their property rights (their dowry, the property shared in marriage, right to equalitarian share of parental inheritances). In several cases well-known wholesale merchants involved in Spanish colonial trade forced their daughter´s renunciation to their inheritance, and their entrance in convents in order to preserve the family fortune through male lines, against the Castilian law. In other cases divorce demands of humble women indicate the existence of a large number of independent women

31 P. Fernández Pérez (1997)

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who had their own small business (usually in food production/distribution) and sometimes invested their small benefits in the high profit activity of colonial trade.32

Family archives have been historically very difficult to study by historians in Spain, because of preservation problems, but also due to illiteracy problems with a gender accent that has maintained a high percentage of women unable to keep written records. This is particularly true for the early modern period, when illiteracy in Spain was higher than in other European countries like England or Sweden, and when diaries were very rare compared with diaries written by entrepreneurs in Italy. Family records start to be better preserved from the 19th century onwards, and most of the publications on them have focused on men´s entrepreneurship rather than women´s. There are some valuable exceptions, like the letters exchanged between the Mallorcan Antoni Fluxà Figuerola, a liberal entrepreneur in the shoemaking industry and his daughter, whom the father trained while she was single to be able to manage his accounts and comercial networks. 33 Family records have also been difficult to access due to the long history of dictatorship in Spain (1939-1975), whose political protection of illegal entrepreneurial practices led to document destruction from public opinion. Despite the problems, and maybe because time has gone by for many who were witnesses of this political period of Spanish history, information from family records start to be frequently studied and published, and some of these studies have used memoirs and letters to uncover gender perspectives of Spanish industrial history.34

Family archives, despite being scarce, demonstrate for some relatively well-known family firms the essential role played by women in the creation and consolidation of some of the main business dinasties of the country, such as the Ybarra family, which has been part of the Spanish business elite for the last two centuries, the Fluxà founding family of what would become the Lottusse shoe making corporation, and the Roca Soler family creators of the Roca Group manufacturers of radiators and sanitary equipment–one of the most important family groups of Spain by sales. The

32 P. Fernández Pérez (1996) and (1997).33 M. Pieras Villalonga and B. Perelló Carrió(2002), Antoni Fluxà Figuerola. 1853-1918. Familia, industria i formació. Ajuntament d´Inca, Palma de Mallorca.34 P.Fernández (article in progress), “Hilos de metal: las industrias del alambre del hierro y del acero en España (1850-1935)”

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activity of Geroma Cabiedes, Francisca Aina Fluxà Figuerola and Angela Roca Soler in the first stages of growth of their family firms was fundamental, as we will see in the final section of this paper.35

Notarial records are an enormously rich source of information about entrepreneurs, either men or women. Because until three decades ago the law required the presence of a male relative when a woman atended the notary, with few exceptions, it is hard to read from women´s notarial records a direct testimony of their thoughts, which was not the case when it was a man who used the services of a notary. However, they do have provided invaluable data about entrepreneurial activity that goes unrecorded in official statistics.36This is the same utility provided by documents of charitable and solidarious institutions, from which several studies have stressed their importance to observe networks of immigrants in big cities, the creation of solidarious networks of finance and credit among humble sectors of society, and the important role women had in critical economic situations to provide survival and services to poor people in big cities.37

The census data, while deficient in some respects, still provide a good measure of the labor force participation of women outside their homes in the paid market. The main problems related to censuses data are the definitions used. Until the second half of the 20th century, censuses recorded “occupation” and not “work” and thus, have the tendency to underestimate female activity because of pluriactivity, underemployment and the general assertion that women were mainly housewives and men were breadwinners. As a matter of fact, in the Spanish censuses at the end of 19th century and first half of the 20th, a woman partially involved in the labour market will be captured by census as housewife, and a man in the same circunstance will be considered as “jornalero” dayly laboreur .38

35 Javier de Ybarra e Ybarra (2002), Nosotros, Los Ybarra. Vida, Economía y Sociedad (1744-1902), Barcelona, Tusquets Editores; M. Pieras and B. Perelló (2002). P. Fernández Pérez (2000) “Angela, Matías, Martín y Josep Roca Soler” in E. Torres, coord., Los 100 empresarios españoles del siglo XX. LID Editorial Empresarial, Madrid.36 A. Sola (2002) “Les puntaires del Baix Llobregat. Primeres notes per a un estudi socioeconòmic”, in C. Borderías, ed., Les dones i la història del Baix Llobregat. Publicacions de l´Abadia de Montserrat, Barcelona, pp. 315-330.37 M. Carbonell (1997) Sobreviure a Barcelona. Dones, pobresa i asistencia al segle XVIII. Eumo Editorial, Barcelona. In the Xth Economic History Symposium of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, “Network Analysis in Economic History” (Bellaterra, January 2005) the frequent creation of informal welfare and solidarious networks is analyzed.38 Lina Gálvez Muñoz (1997), “Breadwinning Patterns and Family Exogenous Factors: the Tobacco Factory of Seville Workers during the Industrialisation Process (1887-1945), International Journal of Social History, Vol.42, pp.87-128. Contrary evidence finds T.Hatton and R.E. Bailey for English Censuses in the early 20th century. Their conclusion is that if

20

However its deficiencies censuses are an important source because though incomplete in total activity figures they do get the increased entrance of women in paid and visible labour market. As an example, the registered increase in married women´s labor force participation during the 20th

century did reflect a real change that was taking place among women as economic agents. Previous cohorts of married women may have labored in a “hidden” way from the perspective of the census takers.

Other sources that contain information about entrepreneurs are, for the 19th century, tax commercial and industrial registers which at the local level allow the study of women´s independent economic activity hidden by other sources like censuses, like it has been the case of the blond lace-makers in 19th century Catalonia Angels Solà has recently studied.39

Other local sources that have proved to be useful are registers of the city markets, which have been used by Montserrat Miller to indicate the strong presence of independent women´s activity in the distribution of food in 19 th

century Barcelona, even safeguarded by market regulations that contrary to Spanish Civil Codes protected women´s entrepreneurial property in the market beyond husband´s authority.40 And, for the 20th and early 21rst century, publications and electronic information from public and private institutions. Particularly important to obtain data with a gender perspective are statistics and publications from the Instituto de la Mujer of the Spanish Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales, and Women´s Institutes of different Autonomous Communities of the Spanish State, which during the last two decades have financed the elaboration of extremely important statistics and reports. Private associations like the Instituto de la Empresa Familiar, or associations of women entrepreneurs located in every major city of the country have also published important reports that show the rapid growth of associations among women entrepreneurs, and a higher sensibility to the existence of such group of entrepreneurs in major lobbies of the country like the I.E.F.41

anything, labour force participation rates derived from the census overstate the “true” participation female rates. Timothy J. Hatthon and Roy E. Bailey (2001), “Women´s work in census and survey, 1911-1931”, Economic History Review, LIV, 1, pp.87-107.39 Angels Sola (2002).40 Montserrat Miller (forthcoming book), Feeding Barcelona: Markets, Policy, and Consumer Culture, 1714-1975. Also general published references in Montserrat Miller (1993), “Mercats nou-centistes a Barcelona: Una interpretació dels seus orígens i significat cultural”. Revista de l´Alguer. Anuari acadèmic de cultura catalana (Dec. 1993), Vol. IV, no.4, 93-106. 41 M.P.Alcobendas Tirado (1983), Datos sobre el trabajo de la mujer en España. Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Madrid. Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales-Instituto de

21

Historians have helped produce more sources that provide new statistics to analyze entrepreneurship with a gender approach. They do reveal the statistic existence of women entrepreneurs, though they also demonstrate such existence is very old, and not something new like the above mentioned stereotypes want to make us believe. Registered patents are one of such sources. Most patents registered in Spain until the last decades were done –as in all Western countries- by men, however, there was also a female presence. This is important for two reasons. First, because it shows the rectrictions women faced related to innovation and entrepreneurship; and second, because the sectors in which women concentrated their patents are an extremely good source of information of the sectors in which their economic activity was specialized and restricted, as well as their difficulties for having access to higher, technical or university education. 42

What do all these theories and sources tell us about women´s entrepreneurial activity in Spain in the long-run? What legal, economic and social conditions contributed to a gendered specialization in different business activities? Which was this specialization in the context of the little-known female activities in family firms and self-employment? Is the decreasing importance of gender in the last three decades a sign of increasing promotion possibilities and power regardless gender, in Spanish public and private firms?

la Mujer (www.mtas.es/mujer). Organizaciones de mujeres empresarias en España. Instituto de la Empresa Familiar (1997), La mujer y la empresa familiar. Instituto de la Empresa Familiar, Barcelona, Documento 083, marzo 1997. M. Aranda (1991), Las empresarias en la Comunidad de Madrid. Comunidad de Madrid-Dirección General de la Mujer, Madrid. Diputació de Girona, org. (1997), Dones emprenedores i associacionisme empresarial. Jornades organitzades per la Diputació de Girona, 11 de juliol 1997. Diputació de Girona, Girona. C.A. Escudero Gallegos (1995), La actividad empresarial de la mujer en Málaga. Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer, Málaga. Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales-Instituto de la Mujer (2000), Nuevos yacimientos de empleo y redes de cooperación entre empresas: aportaciones de los grupos de trabajo transnacionales, diciembre 1999. Instituto de la Mujer, Madrid. A. Mercadé Ferrando (1995), Les noves emprenedores, GC Comunicació, Barcelona. OECD (1997), Women Entrepreneurs in Small and M edium Enterprises: a major force in innovation and job creation. OECD Conference, Paris, 16-18 April 1997. OECD, Paris. M. Romero López, dir. (1990), La actividad empresarial femenina en España. Ministerio de Asuntos Sociales-Instituto de la Mujer, Madrid. M. Sánchez-Apellániz (1997), Mujeres, dirección y cultura organizacional. CIS, Madrid.42 All information related to Spanish Patent Register comes from Luis Blázquez; Francisco Cayón; Joan González-Bueno; Francisco Llorens; J. David Martín; Alberto Martín; Jorge Morales; Vanessa Moreno; Rayco Ouviña; and J. Patricio Sáiz. (Work in progress).We thank the authors for letting us use this information.

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III. Women´s business activity in Spain: the slow decreasing importance of gender in entrepreneurship

History, Sociology and Economic History literature often relate women´s access to vote in Spain with women´s landing in the economic and business arenas in Spain. The slow advance of liberalism would have opened up in recent times possibilities for the participation of women in the world of business. The advance of liberalism would have contributed to these increased possibilities with more equalitarian rights in education, access to all kinds of professions and jobs, and political participation. However, and since the early 20th century there has been a long debate about the positive contribution of industrialization, capitalism and liberalism to the improvement of women´s condition. If we compare the 18th with the 19th centuries, there was an increased loosening of rights women had enjoyed protected by traditions and laws in some regions and commercial cities. In addition, the triumph of the 19th scientific revolution had brought as the mainstream discourse the biologically-determined “natural” superiority of men over women, which suffocated or diminished the importance education and culture had had in the 18 th century to qualify citizens regardless gender.43

This widespread “unconscious” connection between political rights and women´s access to the world of business is very rooted in academic and more popular publications. We can find such connection in general books with biographies of “successful women”, works about gender perspectives in human resources approaches, publications of the Family Firm Institute in Spain, and in books with a sociological approach published by organizations of women´s entrepreneurs, like the one with the prologue written by R. Rato included at the beginning of this paper.44This perspective, very entrenched in public opinion and in scientific publication considers women´s entrepreneurship only when they “create” employment and business opportunities. That is, it only considers women´s entrepreneurship as far as women visibly and legally own or manage a firm or have a salaried relationship with a firm. The underlying definition of

43 On the evolution of “scientific” ideas about sex differences see, Anne Fausto-Sterling (1994), Myths of gender. Biological theories about women and men. Nueva York. Basic Books.44 J. Cuesta Bustillo, dir. (2003), Historia de las mujeres en España. Siglo XX. Instituto de la mujer (Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales), Madrid. 4 vols.

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entrepreneurship of this perspective, when considering women, asumes the need to demonstrate the existence of a legal contract or relationship with the firm, either as an employer or employee. However, a review of the state of the art about entrepreneurship, which almost always take men´s examples to illustrate the variety of possibilities, very rarely take into account the legal relationship of men with the firm. The extensive literature about what an entrepreneur/manager is deals with the qualities, behaviour, and goals, of the persons and organizations who effectively exert control of the firm. Classical and recent literature about the firm asumes that the entrepreneur or manager has a legal relationship with the firm, but except for works dealing with agent/client problems the legal link between a person and a firm is not explicitly considered the key to count and analyze entrepreneurship.

Why, therefore, women´s legal registration as entrepreneurs, managers or workers should, even if implicitly, matter to study women´s entrepreneurship? Women have always participated in business life, with or without legal recognition, with or without salaries. Until the industrial revolution they massively provided services in cities and in the countryside within agriculture, trade, manufacture, and the household. After the industrial revolution they participated increasingly in trade and manufacture, but their dominant activity was still to provide services within and outside the household, within and outside the firm.

Current stereotypes indicate that, in the relationship between business and gender, women´s legal status within a firm matter more than men´s, either in academic or more divulgative publications. They do also suggest that economists and managers in Spain (as in other countries) have not incorporated a gender perspective in their definitions of what entrepreneurship has historically been. It also indicates that probably the textbooks and class-notes these professionals used during their training period also contained very entrenched stereotypes and definitions that are not consistent with reality.

According to recent research on U.S. business history, “business” is a word that should be re-defined when gender perspective is applied. A. Kwolek-Folland defines in this way business as the action of compromising with an economic activity in the market to obtain a benefit, by assuming

24

the financial risk implied in such activity.45 Benefits must not be exclusively of economic nature, risk should not be defined only in monetary terms but also by taking into account personal and family elements. This is consistant with “social capital” theories according to which “capital” is also a concept which includes not only economic characteristics but also in business life it also relates to knowledge and unregistered transactions among persons of the same business group.46 From this perspective, gender theories together with network analysis or social capital concepts allow a critical reassessment of the economic rational choice of the neoclassic analysis and its original concept of the firm as only or basically a production unit. They also would question the traditional concept of qualification in the labour market, and as a matter of fact, the traditional neoclassical explanation of promotions based on productivity differences.47 These approaches would allow also to analyze cooperativism as an example of inclusive networks, by showing the importance of personal relations to develop entrepreneurial relations. Also, clubs and informal associations have an important gender component due to different sociability patterns boys and girls are taught since childhood, and also due to differential uses of time in the labour market according to gender –greater for men than women.

In this section we will summarize the most important conditions that have historically framed business activity with a gender reading. First, those related with the changing legislation regarding civil and working rights. Second, education at an informal family level and at a formal institutionalised way. It follows an overview of business activities which shows women specialized either within family businesses, self-employed or in a diverse sort of services occupations. The scarce presence of women in top management despite the apparently decreasing importance of gender for entrepreneurship in the last three decades is finally explained in terms of differential gender access to power.45 A. Kwolek-Folland,op.cit.,p.5. The revision of the etymology of “business” by M.Yaeger demonstrates it is one of the common words with a highest sexed content, Mary Yaeger op.cit, pp.26-29.46 For an application of social capital theory to Dutch food industry, see D. Arnoldus (2002), Family, Family Firm, and Strategy: Six Dutch Family Firms in the Food Industry 1880-1970. Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.47 A gender analysis of the concept of qualification both historically and in the historiography, in Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2001), Compañía Arrendataria de Tabacos, 1887-1945. Cambio Tecnológico y Empleo Femenino, Madrid, Lid, ch.8; and from the same author (2003) “Engendering the Experience of Wages: the Evolution of the Piecework System at the Spanish Tobacco Monopoly, 1800-1930” in Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz (eds.), Experiencing Wages. Employers, Earners, Pay Systems and Wage Forms in Europe since 1500, Berghahn Publishers, New York.

25

III. 1. The legal conditionsG. Tortella has recently outlined a supposed scarcity of

entrepreneurs in Spanish history, due to a wide range of reasons like endowment of natural resources, human capital, credit, economic policies, cultural and religious reasons, and a poor fragmented market.48 The assertion has been criticized among others by J.M. Valdaliso, who indicates the elasticity of entrepreneurs in Spain, depending on business opportunities and existing rules of the game for entrepreneurship. But gender has not been included in this debate. We believe women´s legal seggregation until 1975 was one of such rules of the game that determined women´s and in general Spanish entrepreneurship in modern times. Legal rights influenced the availability and specialization of women as entrepreneurs and workers in the Spanish firms. Laws regarding not only education but above all property rights, the exercise of industrial and mercantile activities, and the jobs and salaries obtainable in the labour market affected in a very different way men´s and women´s entrepreneurship in Spain, particularly from the late 1880s until 1975. These differences influenced from childhood the seggregation of women´s activity in some particular sectors, reduced their accumulated experience and capital (either in these overcrowded sectors reserved to them or in the sectors less open to them), and conditioned available possibilities in adult life. Only in the last three decades the law has been rapidly putting down restrictions and gender differences that had enormously influenced the evolution of entrepreneurship in this country.

The varied laws that directly affected women´s economic activity included legislation about access to education, protective measures for women workers, about differential salaries according to gender, restrictive measures to access particular branches of economic activity or to be able to sign contracts, prohibitive measures to avoid having women managers in public administrations, and lately equalitarian policies. Despite the enormous complexity to analyze these laws between the late 19th century and the end of the 20th century, available studies coincide in outlining that the restrictions for women´s legal ability to participate in a firm grew with 48 The last piece of this debate was published by G. Tortella in the newspaper “La Vanguardia” on July 4 2004, in which he again insisted on the scarcity of men entrepreneurs, an argument he initiated in the ending years of the 1990s that has been opposed by several historians like J. Nadal and J.M.Valdaliso, among others.

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the imposition of the so-called liberal State in Spain throughout the 19th

century. Between the 1910s and early 1930s there were some isolated measures that tried to reverse past restrictions more in terms of education rights than real property rights. The Francoist dictatorship broke this slow path of change and convergence with other Western countries, and its legislation significantly increased the distance with other countries in which the establishment of modern democratic regimes was increasing the equalitarian participation of women in education and entrepreneurship. Only in 1975 this strong divergence started to be reduced, in terms of discriminatory legislation.49

New institutional theories have explicitly indicated that legal codes and property rights do not determine but can highly condition economic activity and entrepreneurship.50 Private law and property rights in Spain have historically been very different between regions, particularly before the 19th century.51 However, during the 19th and 20th centuries a more comprehensive Spanish law started to be applied in all the territories, conditioning women´s access to entrepreneurship.

During the last third of the 19th century (the political period of the “Restauración” in Spanish textbooks) the authority and power of the husband over the family unit was enshrined, as well as the legal inferiority of women and children. This was a relatively important change regarding the Middle Ages and Early Modern times, when legal codes of Castilian tradition but also of other regional traditions (like in Catalonia and Basque territories) had preserved during centuries the power of the parents, the power of the elders. For some authors, this change indicated a decline of the old patriarchalism and the rise of individualism, very well in tune with the liberalism that was slowly spreading in Spanish political life. However, the new individual rights were far from being complete or universal. For women it meant not a legal empowerment, but a legal transfer from fathers´ to husbands´ authority .52

49 A recent and authorized overview in J. Cuesta Bustillo, dir. (2003), 4 vols. For the period before the civil war also works by G. Nielfa, C. Flecha and A. Pascual in C. Sarasúa and L. Gálvez, eds. (2003)50 D.C. North (1991), “Institutions, Transaction Costs and the Rise of Merchant Empires” in J.D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires. Cambridge University Press, New York. Also several works in the special issue on institutions published by Scandinavian Economic History Review (2000).51 J.Casey et al. (1987) La familia en la España mediterránea (siglos XV-XIX), Barcelona, Crítica. edit. D.S.Reher, La familia en España. Alianza, Madrid 1998.52 See Paloma Fernández (1997), El rostro familiar de la metrópoli. Redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Cádiz, 1700-1812, Madrid, Siglo XXI de España Editores. Also from the

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The new liberal laws particularly affected property rights of married women and widows. The Civil Code of 1889 granted husbands full control of women´s share of the marriage common properties or “gananciales”, reduced women´s right to behave as legal tutors of their offspring, and prohibited women´s entrepreneurial activity without the consent of their husbands. Legally, these 1889 limitations to married women´s control of their property and children lasted for almost a century, until the laws of 1958 and above all 1975 eliminated married women´s need to obey their husbands and the requirement of having the husband´s consent to be able to participate in a business or a legal act.53 Until thirty years ago, in Spain, a husband had the right to control his wife´s salary, and to prohibit his wife´s work outside the house. The apparently more leftist legislation of the II Republic (1931-1939), whose 1931 Constitution granted for the first time in Spain the equalitarian right to work and education for both genders, maintained discriminatory policies towards working women when the 1931 Law of Working Contracts (Ley de Contratos Laborales) indicated that only with husband´s authorization or with divorce could a working married woman control her own salary.54 The Civil Codes widely discriminated married women and limited their ability to manage their properties and salaries to become independent economic agents.

Civil laws have not provided easy legal possibilities to have married women in the working force and the entrepreneurial group in Spain. Economic growth and entrepreneurial dynamism have often required a good endowment of what we call human capital, through a long process of education, technical training, and legal protection of the labor force. A series of laws prohibited night work (laws 24 July 1873, 13 March 1900, 11 July 1912), and women´s work in jobs considered to be unhealthy and dangerous (royal decree 15 July 1897). Until the royal order of 2 sept. 1910 women with academic titles could not perform professions related with the Ministry of Education, and the “Ley de Bases” of 22 July 1918 about civil servants limited women´s jobs to the category of “auxiliary person”,

same autor, “El declinar del patriarcalismo en España. Estado y familia en la transición del Antiguo Régimen a la Edad Contemporánea”, en James Casey y Juan Hernández Franco, eds., (1997), Familia, Parentesco y Linaje, Murcia, Universidad de Murcia, pp-379-303.53 Código Civil (1889). Madrid, Imprenta del Ministerio de Gracia y Justicia. An analysis of its implications in Josefina Cuesta Bustillo, dir. (2003), Historia de las mujeres en España. Siglo XX, Madrid, Instituto de la Mujer-Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales, vol. I, pp. 217-219. On the 1958 and 1975 legal changes, J. Cuesta, dir., op.cit, vol. II, pp. 211-212.54 J. Cuesta, dir., op.cit., vol. I, p. 329-331.

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defining tasks they could and could not perform. During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera nine women were appointed to the National Assembly in the “Junta Superior de Beneficencia”, but new prohibitions limited able women to occupy some professions like “registradores de la propiedad”, “notarios”, “Recaudadores de hacienda”, “secretarios e interventores de Diputación o Cabildo insular” (royal order 24 April 1924,31 Dec.1924 and royal decree 20 March 1925). Women were however allowed to occupy the bottom jobs in feminine educational centers, and women with university titles had the recognized right to participate in the public exams to enter the “Cuerpo Técnico de Letrados del Ministerio de Justicia y Culto” (royal decree 2 June 1924 and 17 Nov. 1928).

Women could be elected to the National Assembly during Primo de Rivera´s dictatorship, but a major declaration of equalitarian rights regardless gender was only first contained in the Constitution of the II Republic in the 1930s, and above all after 1975, when women in Spain had the recognized equal legal rights to receive education, training, and labour protection regardless their gender and married status. The story of such legal rights can be traced back to the first decade of the 20th century, and were firmly elaborated in Republican laws of the 1930s. However, legal progress in education did not mean equal progress in women´s legal rights to work: the law of July 1912 prohibited night work for women, the law of Sept. 1910 required a title for a woman with a university degree in order to establish by herself as a professional, and the Estatuto de funcionarios públicos of 1918 limited women´s access to work in the public administration to the lower levels of auxiliar and técnico.55Women students increased during the II Republic, though the growth of women professors was slower. Equal rights for women workers were proclaimed in the II Republic legislation, but salaries of women were between 66/36% lower than men depending on sector and activity between 1932-1939.56

The moral codes underlying the legal codes preserved higher levels of the public administration, and the free exercise of a liberal profession of university degrees, to men. These codes, as in other countries that had experienced liberal reforms, enshrined the ideal of a better educated woman in a liberal society, and the importance her education had in

55 J. Cuesta, dir., vol. I, 219-259. The figures of registered students come from pages 237 and 247.56 J. Cuesta, dir. Vol. I, p. 348-448. The salaries, in p. 348.

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fostering good citizens in the new societies. Progress was, thus, more visible in women´s institutionalized education than in women´s institutionalized entrepreneurial activity.

After the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) the military dictatorship of general Francisco Franco broke this progress in Spanish human capital formation. Women were simply sent back home again and lost the few legal rights acquired in former legal codes. According to the 1938 “Fuero del Trabajo” some of the most urgent priorities of the new State were to prohibit night work of women and children, to regulate work for others in the house, and “to free” (to expel) married women from the workshop and the factory. The Fuero del Trabajo of 1938 prohibited the salaried work of married women, the law of Sept. 4 1938 required separated education for boys and girls, and the 1944 Ley de Contrato de Trabajo discriminated workers according to gender (until 1970).

The dominant ideology in Spain during this period proclaimed Religion, Fatherhood and the Household as the three cornerstones of Spain. It also proclaimed in public and private discourses women´s inferior talent and creativity, women´s lack of ability to undertake risk, and women´s biologically determined disposition to be, again, doing unpaid services for society within the household. As the woman President of the Francoist Sección Femenina put it in 1943, for the new regime “women never discover anything, they lack of course innovative talent reserved by God to male brains. We women can only interpret, better or worse, what men have done to us”.57 Women had to give free “social services” to the States, and if they were unemployed workers they could not register in public employment offices if they lived with a male relative formally “head of the household” –since 1939. The Ministry of Labour recommended the public sector to fire women workers, except women head of their households who were widows, soldiers´wives or single women without economic resources. Until 1961 most ordinances of public and private firms contained specific rules to fire women employees if they married. Despite the imposition of these drawbacks in women´s legal rights the Francoist regime had no problems in signing the Agreement number 100 of the ILO (Geneva, 29 June 1951) in which equal pay regardless gender was recognized. Few

57 Luis Otero (2004), La Sección Femenina. De cuando a la mujer española se le pedía ser hogareña, patriota, obediente, disciplinada, abnegada, diligente, religiosa, decidida, alegre, sufrida y leal, Madrid, Edaf.

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women polititians, writers, journalists, lawyers, and judges, could perform the jobs for which they had been trained before the war, to help other women workers benefit from the potential effects of the 1951 Agreement.

To have professional and working women back home after a war was not peculiar to Spain, and European countries with National Assemblies dominated by men tried to do precisely that right after the I and II WW.58

However, the enclosure of professional and working women in Spain lasted longer than in these countries after the civil war of 1936-1939, up to the early 1960s. Due to the strong inflation of the 1940s and 1950s, and to the new laws protecting stable labour, to have women back home was a cheap strategy devised by the State, that firms often followed, to save money in a country whose 1929 GDP was only recovered in 1953. The change in Francoist legislation regarding women´s rights to receive payment and recognition for their work will arrive in the early 1960s, coinciding with the Stabilization Plan of 1959 and the need to change the critical economic policies of the previous twenty years. After 1959 the Spanish economy increased its integration in the global institutions and markets, and that meant among other things a strong foreign investment in Spain, particularly in high technology industries. The golden age of growth then took place in Spain, and required more labour. Women´s salaried and legal working activity increased in the official statistics spectacularly, and approximately 50 per cent of such registered activity went for the services sector according to C. Borderias analysis of censuses, and could be observed in Table 2.59 The need to legally define the new registered and salaried situation of women´s work was behind the July 1961 law (about the political, professional, and working rights of women) and the 1962 Decree protecting women´s salaried job in case of marriage. As in other dictatorships of the 1950s-60s, like those in Greece, Portugal, Chile, and Argentina (and like the German and Italian fascists regimes of the 1930s-40s) the legal changes regarding women´s registered salaried work were partly a sign of “modernity” addressed to international institutions, more than a real legal progress.60 It was not until 1975 that Spanish laws eliminated the requirement a woman had to obey her husband. Only in 1970 a decree indicated the legal elimination of the discrimination of 58 B.S. Anderson and J.P. Zinsser (1988), A History of their Own. Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. Harper and Row Publishers, New York. 2 vols.59 J. Cuesta, dir., vol II, pp. 14-62. References to C. Borderias´works in vol. II, p. 51.60 The comparison with the other dictatorships, in J. Cuesta, dir., vol. II, p. 193.

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salaries according to gender principles, and only in May 1975 a law protected married women´s rights to participate in a business in equalitarian conditions, abolishing the requirement of husband´s authorization to participate in businesses or legal acts in the Civil Code.61

With the transition to democracy and the full integration of Spain in international institutions equalitarian rights were enshrined in the major law codes, and first of all in the 1979 Constitution. After Franco´s death the legislation started important reforms in the working and political rights of women. More slowly, in civil codes regarding property and family rights, which directly affect possibilities of self-employment and recognition of labour performed in family firms.62 The reform of the gendered discourses of the legislators has been and still is extensive, due to the discriminatory effects revealed in business life and work that were derived from old legislative discourses. These reforms were very modest in the first governments of the UCD, and went more to the fundamental questions with the socialist governments of the PSOE, who created the Instituto de la Mujer within the Ministry of Labour in 1983, and put the basis for extensive changes regarding women´s equal rights in all fronts of economic life, in strong relationship with European institutions and legislation.

III.2. Educating girls/women for serving Influential theories about entrepreneurship indicate that the

entrepreneur is the one who is aware of the opportunities or the one who creates those opportunities. If we accept this, we have to admit that education plays a very important role in such process of awareness and creation, and environmental conditions that affect education in a country. Women and men who are educated, also need family support, financial support, and institutional rights to become businessmen or businesswomen. Education and favourable environmental conditions were not at all easy to achieve for an European woman during the 19 th century and well into the 20th. In the case of Spain, not until the 1970s and 1980s. Both gender discrimination within the labour market and gender differences towards entrepreneurship can be explained by differences 61 J- Cuesta, dir., vol. II, pp. 211-215.62 J.M. Cabrera Díaz (2003), “Derechos humanos y derechos de las mujeres en la democracia española (1975-2000), in J. Cuesta Bustillo, dir., vol. III, p.117-171. See p articularly p. 129. In the same volume, also a work by Manuel Carlos Palomeque López “El derecho constitucional a la igualdad y a la no discriminación en las relaciones de trabajo”, pp. 174-181

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among men and women expressed in political, literary and scientific mainstream discourses. According to the dominant ideas spread in Europe until a few decades ago, men were more productive, had more human capital and showed a more entrepreneurial attitude.

Historical testimonies reveal differences originated not from biological reasons but because men and women grew up differently within their families, within the society as a whole, and especially with a different education and access to education and to different forms of human capital formation within firms and institutions.

Different access to education of male and female was common in 19th century Europe. The gap was already shrinking in the early decades of the 20th centuries, yet there were long-standing important national differences and, even more important, regional differences within nations, showing that for business activity they constituted a complex problem. Thus, differences in education by gender were a supply problem (in terms of the allocation of resources by state, public or private institutions) and also a demand problem because the family demand for education varied depending on the economic specialization or the distribution of income in the different geographical areas, as could be observed in Table 3.

This gap was closing in part thanks to several legal advances. The “Escuela de Institutrices” and the “Escuela de Comercio para Señoras” were born by the strong push of the “Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer” (1871). In 1909 co-education in primary school was firstly instituted and was compulsory for all girls and boys until 12 years old. The first women´s institutes for secondary education were created in 1929. Women could study a university career and have university titles since 1910 (though with limited rights to work as professionals with their titles as we have seen). Schools to make girls and boys read in Spain grew during the first three decades of the 20th century, though literacy rates grew slower for women than for men, particularly in some southern regions. More women atended secondary schools, though in numbers far behind men´s. In Madrid in 1914, for example, there were 3.232 men registered in secondary schools in contrast with only 316 women. In Granada the relationship was in 1916 1.089 men and only 16 women. Between 1915-1927 women registered in the Spanish universities grew from 438 to 3.285, though in percentages of total registrations that meant from 2% to 8% of

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total Spanish university students in that period. In 1915/1916 most university women studied liberal professions connected with the tertiary sector: matronas, practicantes, filosofía y letras, medicina, farmacia, and trade. Scholars that have studied this access to university have not usually stressed the fact that the chosen careers were linked to the tertiary sector, but the fact that the university degrees women chose in this period were very linked to a work with was either a extension of women´s work as mothers (matronas, maestras, enfermeras, beneficencia) or an extension of women´s work inside a family business (women in the Escuelas de Comercio, useful to have women helping in family firm accounting, grew from 319 in 1915/16 to 10.436 in 1929/30).63 This progress in institutionalized education for women was maintained during the II Republic, with free and compulsory primary education, a strong push to increase students in secondary education and co-education of boys and girls.

Table 3. Spanish transition to literacy by regions (1860-1930)

1860 1877 1887 1900 1910 1920 1930Northern Castille

A 42 52 60 68 79 86 90D 53 48 43 33 25 18 14

Leon A 35 43 51 59 67 78 86D 49 48 48 36 36 27 21

Asturias A 30 37 45 55 73 75 89D 46 47 46 40 28 17 15

Galicia A 22 25 29 35 43 53 67D 39 39 42 40 36 31 27

Basque Country

A 38 49 58 69 79 88 96

D 31 27 24 18 15 9 7Navarra A 37 46 54 67 73 83 91

D 31 25 23 17 12 8 6Aragón A 22 28 35 42 49 61 74

D 30 30 30 27 25 19 17Catalonia A 24 32 40 48 58 72 82

D 28 26 26 23 20 15 12Valencia/Murcia

A 16 24 24 30 37 48 62

D 17 16 18 17 17 17 18East Andalusia

A 17 20 23 27 31 37 58

D 15 13 15 14 13 15 19Canary Islands

A 14 19 22 30 33 38 50

D 10 9 7 8 5 4 10West Andalusia

A 27 33 35 43 46 54 67

D 15 13 13 13 12 11 13

63 J. Cuesta, dir., vol. I, p. 242

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Southern Castille

A 24 29 33 37 43 49 61

D 28 26 25 23 22 20 20Madrid A 51 62 66 76 77 84 92

D 30 28 26 21 19 13 12A= Literacy rate over total adult population/ D= Differential by gender in percentage pointsSource: Clara Eugenia Nuñez (1992), La Fuente de la Riqueza. Educación y desarrollo económico en la España Contemporánea, Madrid, Alianza Universidad, p.132.

Despite these general changes, the Spanish gender gap regarding education varied enourmously among different regions and among rural and urban areas though it converged during the literacy transition in late 19th century and early 20th century. By 1930, as it is possible to observe in Table 3, literacy ratio was quite high in many regions and the gender gap was not superior in any region to 30 points. 64 The Civil War of 1936-9 and especially the political and economic conditions that followed with Franco´s regime, delayed this evolution, especially in rural areas. It was not until the 1960s that a complete schooling of infant population was achieved.

The gender gap was in quantitative terms finally closed in the 1960s in primary education, in the late 1970s in secondary education and in the late 1980s in higher education up to the point to have today more female than male university students.65 But what happened with qualitative differences?. Women are still concentrated in some university degrees such as medicine, humanities, social sciences, and men have proportionally a higher presence in sciences, engineering and all sort of technical degrees. However, the opportunities both men and women face are now the same, and the seggregated schools are a minority -they were not so thirty years ago during Franco´s dictatorship, and they were the norm in the 19 th

century and early 20th century. Spanish girls were not only less present in school than boys, but also

they received a seggregated education with course contents different from those received by boys. Girls were schooled within a model that defined sewing, knitting, lace-making and embroidery as the more adequate occupations for women. Girls´ schooling years were mostly devoted to them, and explains why girls´ increased schooling was compatible with high illiteracy rates in Spain. Following the Moyano Law of 1857, the one

64 To see the discussion about supply and demand reasons in explaining iliteracy rates in Spain, see Carmen Sarasúa (2002), “Aprendiendo a ser mujeres: las escuelas de niñas en la España del siglo XIX”, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, vol.24, 281-297.65 Josefina Cuesta (ed.) op.cit. vol.2, p.233

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that regulates primary education in Spain for the whole literacy transition period, subjects such as Agriculture and Industry and Commerce were only taught to boys, while girls received an education related to their “sex”.66

Childhood, the age in which we learn, was precisely for this, the age at which girls and boys had to learn the occupations which had to socially define them at an adult age as men or women.67 Education at home often reinforced the social values expressed in school programs.

The different education boys and girls received was essential for explaining occupational seggregation, both horizontal and vertical segregation. This is important because it naturalised differences in professions and earnings. It seemed as if the occupation defined the wage, and not the individual productivity as the basic neoclassical model explains.68 Productivity differences among workers/entrepreneurs reflect, in part, the decisions they make as to whether or not to continue their schooling, participate in a training program, remain continously in the labour market and so on. Faced with discrimination in the labour market that lowers the retuns to such human capital investmens, women are likely to have less incentive to undertake them. To the extent that such indirect or feedback effects of labour market discrimination exist, they are also expected to adversely affect the economic outcomes of women compared to men. In fact to explain gender gap and occupational segregation by differences in human capital –supply explanations- and because of labour market discrimination –demand explanations- do not necessarily constitute mutually exclusive sources of gender differentials. Since discrimination in the labour market lowers women´s incentives to invest in their qualifications and women´s lower qualification reinforce statistical discrimination –to consider group characteristics and potential productivity instead of individual ones- against them.69 As we will see in the next

66 On technical schools in 18th and 19th centuries, Joaquim Cuevas and Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2001) ”Technical education, institutional change and regional development in 18th and 19th century Spain”, Proceeding EBHA conference, Oslo.67 Carmen Sarasúa (2002), “Aprendiendo a ser mujeres: las escuelas de niñas en la España del siglo XIX”, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, vol.24, 281-297.An exception on this seggregated education were the Anarchist schools that were extended all over Spain in the first third of 20th century68 Francine Blau, Simpson y Anderson (1998), “Continuing Progess? Trends in occupational seggregation in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s” Feminist Economics, IV, 1998, pp.29-71. 69 Francine Blau, Marianne A. Ferber and Anne E. Winkler (2002), The Economics of Women, Men and Work, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, p.260.

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section, occupation segregation is a key explanation on understanding female business activity.

III.3. Women´s business activity: A long period of cheap women´s service outsourcing

Until the 1980s, real economic life of women remained dominantly outside the world of legal contracts and firm ownership, serving firms and public institutions at a low cost. It was, what we have called, the long period of cheap women´s service outsourcing. This was the period during which women´s economic activity remained closely related to providing services within the household without contract or income. The main work specialties were on the one hand to take care of less able individuals for whom society did not have financial resources to take care of (children, elders). And, on the other hand, to provide unpaid services for able individuals who were morally and culturally trained to work only outside the house and in exchange of diverse forms of remuneration. Participation of salaried women in the new factories grew at a slow pace particularly in the consumer goods industries. In the tobacco industry it decreased in Spain a 70 per cent between 1880s and 1930s because of the mechanization process expected outcome of a series of labour-saving technological innovations. In all these activities the income and benefits were lower than for similar activities realized by men.70

Household activities and self-employment at a individual level within own´s house, and sometimes organized by groups of women in urban neighbourhoods and in the countryside were the most frequent entrepreneurial activity. Family archives indicate that in cases of a family business, in addition to the above work specialties, women also provided unpaid services that had a fundamental importance in key periods and sections of a firm. According to J. de Ybarra, Geroma Gutiérrez de Cabiedes –José Antonio Ybarra de los Santos´wife, considered the founder of the dynasty- in the consolidation of the Ybarra business, shared the business shop with her husband, while Geroma had already taken care of her brothers´ accounts before getting married with Ybarra, and ran the shop in the early years of 1800 until her death in 1837, while her husband

70 See the works edited by Carmen Sarasúa and Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2003) ¿Privilegios o Eficiencia? Mujeres y Hombres en los Mercados de Trabajo, Alicante, Universidad de Alicante. Also references in J. Cuesta, dir., vol. I pp. 189-196.

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specialised more and more in trading mineral.71 Another aspect very relevant for the consolidation of this business elite very closed to political power both in its Andalusian and Basque branches was their marriage strategies. The marriage of some of the sons with daughters of influential economic and political families, helped the “clan” to build important networks with the political power which were essential in the development of their business. This was a frequent practice, as another example, that of the Spanish founder of González & Byass in Jerez, Manuel María González Angel, shows. Manuel María González arranged the marriage of his son Pedro Nolasco in 1877 with Maria N. Gordon, of the Gordon family of sherry exporters, thus “merging” two of the most important sherry families of Jerez through marriage strategies.72 In the case of these families they were very successful in building networks which permitted them to act in very politized markets. Daughters also helped to build these networks and provided human capital to the family business since often sons in law have played an essential role in the development of family business like it was the case of José Vilallonga o Víctor Chávarri in the Ybarra case.

The case of Geroma Gutiérrez de Cabiedes with managerial responsibilities in the family firm was maybe exceptional, but not isolated. Other cases are known, that suggest the temporary though important role many women performed in the first developing stages of a family firm, without contract and often without any payment or official recognition. Thus, Angela Roca Soler worked as accountant or book-keeper for the family metal workshop that would become the multinational Roca Radiadores S.A. (in the Roca Group). Between 1913 and 1917 her two brothers Matias and Martín worked in Paris to learn new techniques of radiator manufacturing, and her brother Josep studied engineering in Barcelona full time. She was responsible of the accounting of the family workshop between 1913 and 1921, approximately, alone for six years (while Matías and Martín were in France doing industrial spyonage) and with her young brother Josep during three years. When the three brothers came back to the workshop she was slowly retired, though she had been the financial head responsible of transforming a local workshop in Manlleu

71 Javier de Ybarra e Ybarra (2002), Nosotros, Los Ybarra. Vida, Economía y Sociedad (1744-1902), Barcelona, Tusquets Editores, p.58.72 P. Fernández Pérez (1999), “Challenging the Loss of an empire: González&Byass of Jerez” in Business History vol. 41, no.4 (Oct. 1999),p. 83.

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into one of the first radiator manufacturing firms of Spain from 1917.73

Another case was that of Francisca Aina Fluxà. She was the only daughter of a liberal shoe-maker of Mallorca who would become founder of the Lottuse brand of shores. Francisca Aina was very well educated, that received exactly the same training a son would have received in a traditional shoe-making manufacturing firm in order to be her father´s successor in the firm: she took foreign languages classes, went to the local school for elite girls, learnt accounting techniques, travelled with her father to Barcelona and Madrid to meet clients and learn the comercial side of the business, and stayed often in the workshop learning how machines and workers operated in the workshop.74 Another example is that of the founder´s wife of the steel wire firm of Codina in the Catalan village of Capellades. In the first years of the establishment of the workshop she ran one of the looms while her husband and another apprentice worked with the rest.75 In the four cases women were not registered as owners or workers, they did not receive any kind of payment, were completely efficient in critical periods of their family firms, and the number of years they worked were completely dependent on the willingness of their male relatives. We know from their existence only because of private correspondence and private documents of family firm archives.

Very often the growth of the firm, in complexity and number of workers coincided with the separation of women from work in the family firm. In contrast, in rural societies women provided a wide range of unpaid or low paid services within the family unit of agricultural production in similar conditions, though usually growth of the firm did not mean for women a complete separation from work in the family business. The case of women workers in Galicia is particularly outstanding of their flexibility and their permanence as workers in several economic sectors, particularly agriculture and fishing, and related industries, always linked to the needs of the family unit or the family firm.

It was precisely in the context of this relatively closer and longer provision of services in rural households that one may understand that the first Spanish woman who registered a patent, in 1865, used this legal tool

73 P. Fernández Pérez (2000)74 M. Pieras and B. Perelló (2002)75 Archivo Histórico de Codina en Capellades. Private album and oral testimony of Marta Capellades. I acknowledge the current woman owner-manager of the firm, Marta Capellades, for letting me study the family records.

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to protect an innovation related with providing services to a rural family firm. The innovation was a carriage designed to to carry animals from house to house in order to sell completely fresh milk from she-donkies, cows and goats, in a personal and visible way to show the quality of the product. The carriage also included a boiler with water to keep the milk warm.76 In general, the evolution of patents registered by women through the 19th and 20th centuries is similar to that of other countries, because before 1878 they represented around 0,6 per cent of the total applications for patents preserved in Spain. From this year until the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939 the rate went up until 1,1 per cent. Most of the applications for patent protection by women were initiated by Spanish women, but there were also by French, English, German and U.S. women. If we consider current figures to look for the evolution in women´s patent registers in Spain, they represented around 13 per cent of the total patent holders, which indicate both the progress in university formation and research training and the increased membership in science-based family firms.

An analysis of women´s patents in Spain through all this long period between 1865 and 2003 indicates that a good 40 per cent of the protected inventions specialized in “common needs of life” like personal or household objects, textiles, foodstuffs, health, or education. Another 20 per cent of these patents are related to “diverse industrial techniques”, 11 per cent to the textile and papermaking industries, 8 per cent to chemistry and metallurgy. With very small percentages they registered inventions linked to mechanics, physics and electricity. Women´s inventive activity was thus concentrated in those areas in which labour seggregation had restricted them, like household service (furnitures, kitchen, cleaning), clothing provision and care, and agricultural tasks. We have already mentioned the carriage to sell fresh milk which guaranteed quality of origin of the product. There was also the 1908 patent of a mechanic seed drill her inventor Laureana Arriola Gárate baptized as “Euskeria”, in which the inventor included an analysis of the agricultural situation in the country at the beginning of the 20th century, and observations about the relationship between low productivity levels of the sector and the system of distribution 76 Oficina Española de Patentes y Marcas, Privilegio 4.006. The first patent registered by a woman in Spain dates back to Dec. 6 1826, by a French resident with the name of Françoise Jaquinet, who protected a portable chimney. Jaquinet explained the original idea as not hers, though, but her deceased husband´s Nicolas Jaquinet –whose business she had taken over after his death. These data about patents come from the above-mentioned unpublished book from P. Saiz et al., whose generous contribution is greatly acknowledged.

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of seeds by hand –which according to Arriola was highly inefficient by leaving some areas with lack of seeds and other areas with an excess of them. She knew foreign seed drills which spread seeds in a more efficient way, and wanted to adapt her machine by incorporating this foreign device and making it flexible depending on the different fertility of the land to work. She was well aware of the impact her device would have either in agricultural productivity or the metal and mechanical industries. Scientifically-based inventions patented by women increased as the progressive abolition of seggregation policies and moors was taking place, and human capital formation in the country slowly included women for registered economic activity. The first patent by a woman with a university degree was registered by Concepción Aleixandre Ballester, physician from the University of Valencia in 1889, who invented and registered in 1910 a gynecological instrument to hold the womb.

Women´s protected innovations in Spain were sometimes developed in the context of a family firm, but also often took place in situations of self-employment and independent entrepreneurial initiatives. Self-employment is a long-standing female activity in our country, as in other countries, and women have not waited public policies to start such an option to earn an income, survival, and independence. Royal documents, notarial sources, tax registers, and municipal censuses have provided illuminating examples of such long history of female independent economic activity. Alone, or in coordinated groups, often in cities, women since at least the 18th and 19th century participated in entrepreneurial endeavours not always linked to their husbands´or fathers´ professions. We find them as bankers, textile entrepreneurs and artisans, rentiers, and merchants. Beatriz de Sampayo was royal banker during the kingdom of Philip IV in the first half of the 17th century.77 Self-employed women of upper and middle classes were found among urban and rural “rentiers”in Spain during early modern times, as revealed by the cases studied for 17th century Madrid, 18th century Cádiz and late 18th century Salamanca and Jaén.78 Angels Sola found hundreds of blond lacemakers or “blondistes” in 18th century small villages of the Catalan coast (Arenys, Vilanova i la Geltrú) and also some of 77 C. Alvarez Nogal (1997), Los banqueros de Felipe IV y los metales preciosos a mericanos (1621-1665). Madrid, Banco de España, p. 94 y 97-98.78 C. Alvarez Nogal (1997), P. Fernández Pérez (1997), El rostro familiar de la metrópoli. Redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Cádiz, 1700-1812. Madrid, Siglo XXI de España Ed.; R. Herr (1989), Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain. At the end of the Old Regime. Berkeley, University of California Press.

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them in 19th century Manresa and Barcelona, with even a dynasty of 5 generations of women blond lacemakers that contributed to the profession and to the transmission of technical knowlege in a book.79 Independent artisans among women existed often linked to guilds and their husbands, though many guilds included in their ordinances provisions that explicitly prohibited their promotion to the high rank of masters, as the case of the Sevillian guild of silk in the 16th century described by M.E. Perry.80 In specialized professions artisan women entrepreneurs, at a small scale but with importance at local level could be outstandingly important, as revealed in works of Juan José Romero.81Self-employed women from lower classes often worked providing services to families in the household, while at the same time providing necessary income to guarantee the liquidity of their family firms in their regions of origin, as Carmen Sarasúa has demonstrated for the 18th century breastfeeders from the Northern Pas Valley who regularly (each time after delivering their babies) went to work in the city of Madrid for upper class families. In a way that resembles very much current temporary work by South American women immigrants who come to Spanish cities leaving behind children and husband, these women of the 18th century earned income their families would later use to invest in technology-transfer and innovation for their own family firms (specialized in the cattle-raising business).82 Self-employment in Spanish markets by women could even lead to practical and local changes in the application of the Spanish civil code provisions. Thus, Montserrat Miller has found that in the late 19th century and early 20th century markets of the city of Barcelona the dominance of women led to the elaboration of new rules that allowed married women to use their property in the markets regardless their husband´s opinion and authorization as law required since 1889.83 79 Angels Sola (2002), “Les puntaires del Baix Llobregat. Primeres notes per a un estudi socioeconòmic”, in C. Borderias, ed., Les dones i la història del Baix Llobregat, I, Barcelona, Publicacions de l´Abadia de Montserrat, pp. 315-330.80 M.E. Perry (1990), Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton University Press.81 Juan José Romero (1997), “La maestría silenciosa. Maestras artesanas en Barcelona en la primera mitad del siglo XIX”, Arenal. Revista de Historia de las Mujeres, num. 4, pp. 275-294. Also from him J. J. Romero (2001), “Familial strategies of artisans during the modernization process: Barcelona, 1814-1860”, History of the Family 6, pp. 203-224.82 Carmen Sarasúa (1994), Criados, nodrizas y amos. El servicio doméstico en la formación del mercado de trabajo madrileño, 1758-1868. Madrid, Siglo XXI de España Ed.83 Montserrat Miller, Feeding Barcelona: Markets, Policy, and Consumer Culture, 1714-1975 (in progress). Also general published references in Montserrat Miller, “Mercats nou-centistes a Barcelona: Una interpretació dels seus orígens i significat cultural”. Revista de l´Alguer. Anuari acadèmic de cultura catalana (Dec. 1993), Vol. IV, no.4, 93-106.

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The Francoist restrictions to women´s participation in business life, and the imposed specialization in providing services explain in many ways the accumulated human capital in these business activities that became visible in women´s entrepreneurial initiatives after the 1970s. Recent data about women entrepreneurs owners of their firms indicate that in Spain, as it seems to be the case in other Western European countries, most women who create their own firms self-employ in the services sector, from rural tourism to restaurants, art galleries, free lance photographic firms (Ouka Lele), hairdressing and food shops, and the popular (and increasingly controlled by immigrants) shops selling cheap Chinese-made products. Franchising is a rising niche where women who want to become self-employed are entering, particularly in the commercial sector, with shops owned by women benefitting from marketing realized by big corporations, like Benetton in textiles or Maurice Messegué in the business of health food products. There are more increasingly visible big firms created and owned by women in the international world of fashion like Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada or TCN by Toton Comella. Less often women entrepreneurs belong to big family firms involved in industry or construction like the Koplowitz sisters. Looking at women co-owners and managers of big family firms, one finds that they are not so many and that they particularly stand in sectors with a high component of export or marketing and advertising. Thus, Anna Bosch from Embutidos y Jamones Noel S.A., Cristina Cebado from Peluquerías Cebado, Adriana Casademont from Embutidos Casademont, Marimar Torres from Marimar Torres Estate in California, María del Mar Raventós from Codorniu, Chon González from González&Byass, and the four Tous sisters Rosa, Alba, Laura and Marta in the Catalan Tous jewelry family business –where 90 per cent of workers are,also, women.84 Human resources are two specific arenas where these women co-owners of small and medium family firms have specialized, and an outstanding example is that of Irene Vázquez, the Asturian woman founder and President of the Barcelona private school of business E.A.D.A. Before the civil war she studied secondary school, and her knowledge of the French language and typewriting helped her in the French exile, where she served as translator for Spanish refugees. Back in Barcelona she studied to be a nurse and

84 For most of these women entrepreneurs see Cien empresarias. Testimonios de 100 mujeres que lo han conseguido. J.deJ.Editores,Madrid,2003. For the Tous family firm, La Vanguardia, Sunday 23 March 2003, p. 79.

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obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology in La Habana. With a strong background of social catholicism and influences of Leo XIII´s doctrine she and her family founded in 1957 the Barcelona business school E.A.D.A., one of the most important private business schools in Catalonia. Now, 81 years old, she still works in her office.85 Firms intensive in R&D more rarely are created by women, like the small Independent Container Agency S.L. by Coral Ortega, and Consignaciones Cuyàs S.L. by Caridad Cuyàs Jorge in maritime and land transport. Or in chemical laboratories like Laboratorios Biolab S.L. by Ana Escario García-Trevijano.86

Women entrepreneurial activity is very much dependent on the scarce economic sectors opened to them because of the occupational seggregation. Both an horizontal and a vertical seggregation by gender interacted. Although different patterns could be found in the long-run between the secondary and the tertiary sector, women were characterized for not having supervision jobs and for having dead-ends jobs, out of any business ladder. For C. Goldin, in the first several decades of the twentieth century there was a rising significance of gender.87 The emergence of gender distinctions accompanied several important changes in the economy including the rise of white-collar work for women and increases in women´s educational attainment. Along the twentieth century the gender gap in labor force participation largely closed and the gap in earnings narrowed considerably, because –in Goldin´s words- of a declining significance of gender in the labour market.

However, before there was a declining significance of gender, there was a rising significance of gender. Although gender differences already existed, gender distinctions in work, jobs, and promotion were extended and solidified in the early twentieth century and these changes became long-lasting. These gender differences originated in the treatment of individuals as members of a group, rather than as separate individuals. Seggregated education in the family, in the society and in the school explained these differences in perceived behaviors. Women who remained in the labor force after marriage, even those who were employed for long periods of time, did not advance greatly in their jobs. Part of the reason

85 La Vanguardia, Sunday 28 March 2004, p. 67.86 Cien empresarias. Testimonios de cien mujeres que lo han conseguido. Madrid, J.de J. Editores, 2003.87 Claudia Goldin (2002), The rising and declining of the significance of gender. NBER (WP) 8915, 2002.

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might be due to the inability of employers to distinguish, when they hired, between women who would remain employed after marriage and those who would not. Not being able to make this distinction, employers offered women “short ladder” or dead-end jobs. Even college graduate women found the labor market to be hostile.

Gender became a truly significant factor in the labour market and in the development of modern business in the first few decades of the 20th

century, and different access to education and educational contents –as analysed in the previous section- did play an important role on that process. Educational changes take long to be reflected in society and labour market. As a matter of fact, early differences in education were conditioning gender differences in the labour market and business activity many decades afterwards. In Spain, the II Republic years (1931-1939) could have been an important positive turning point in gender distinctions in the labour market, education, training and even the home, as it was the IIWW and the post-War period in most Western countries. But it was not, continous seggregated education in Spain from the 1940s to 1970s made a longer-lasting difference in the economic role of men and women in Spain compared to neighbouring Western countries. In addition to the longer duration of gender differences in business life in Spain until the 1970s, the emergence of ordinary white collar work was a process that required a longer period of time in Spain than in other countries, thus explaining Spanish lower female participation rates in occupation data. Secretaries, stenographers, bookkeepers and clerks of all types that were in great demand in other countries, were required to a lesser extent in Spain. However, a gender shift in these professions also happened. By late 19 th

century most of these office workers were men. The secretary was not just only a pretty face but, rather, the trusted employee of the company president often in a direct line for his position. The bookkeeper was the company´s accountant, not a girl working at a bookkeeping machine. Even the stenographer was often a man. But all that changed. Following C. Goldin Pollution theory, the penetration of female into male jobs, meant a pollution of those jobs and as a matter of fact an important decrease in relative wages and status. The office jobs that initially expanded in number were of the skilled type, considered skilled because they were part of a job ladder within the firm. But these jobs were soon replaced by newer

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positions that were not part of an internal job ladder… and then feminized. The process developed with resistance and opposition in SMEs with family structure of ownership that had dominant male workforce. Our own research on a Catalan firm of metal manufactures named Rivière has unveiled that Catholic entrepreneurs that pioneered the introduction of modern methods or organization of production in Spanish family firms were at the same time initially very reluctant to hire nice or young women for their office work, fearing they could reduce the productivity of the male employees, in the early 1920s.88

Big businesses in 20th century Spain were small compared to other European countries.89 In contrast with other Western countries they also mainly belonged to the public sector, to the State, since the 1940s up to the 1990s. Monographic studies by C. Borderías, P.Dominguez Prats and L. Gálvez on Telephone, Railways or Tobacco sectors in Spain, show a very clear gender seggregation in these public enterprises.90 Although women had, in general, better conditions and higher wages in those industries than in the private sector, they were excluded from job ladders –except in the tobacco case before the mechanization process- and marriage bars were applied in the 1940s, just when they were removed in other Western countries. Married women were excluded from all the better jobs available to women in early Franco´s regime Spain. Only from the 1960s the rapid economic growth of the Spain, and the improvement in the education standards stimulated a rise in the demand and supply of qualified female labour, more visible in the Spanish business arena than in the previous two decades.

Women´s participation in the management of public and private firms, as salaried workers or self-employed entrepreneurs has increased in the official statistics all over the 20th century, -with the exception of the

88 Historical Archive of Francisco Rivière Ribas in Barcelona. F.L. Rivière Manén, unpublished memoirs, vol. II. About Rivière, P.Fernández Pérez, (in progress) Rivière, 1854-2004, chapter 5. 89 In general, Carreras and Tafunell (2000). Even in capital intensive sectors such as the metal mechanic one, the big firm was not the norm among private firms in Spain before the Spanish Civil War. Paloma Fernández (in progress) Rivière 1854-2004, chapter 3, based on data of military commissions of 1916 preserved in the military archive of Segovia.90 Boderías (1993), Entre Líneas. Trabajo e Identidad Femenina en la España Contemporánea. La Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España, 1924-1980, Barcelona, Icaria; Pilar Domínguez Prats (2003) “Trabajos iguales y condiciones desiguales. Las guardesas y los guardabarreras en RENFE 1941-1971” in Carmen Sarasúa and Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2003) ¿Privilegios o Eficiencia? Mujeres y Hombres en los Mercados de Trabajo, Alicante, Universidad de Alicante, pp.357-378; Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2001), Compañía Arrendataria de Tabacos 1887-1945. Cambio tecnológico y empleo femenino, Madrid, Lid.

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first two decades of Franco´s regime-. In fact, there were very few cases at the beginning of the 20th century like the case of María Espinosa de los Monteros, manager of a subsidiary firm of a U.S. multinational, The Yost Typewriter Co. Ltd., which manufactured and sold typrewriters in Spain. María Espinosa registered in 1908 two patents related to a new typrewriter and an improvement in the way ink was used in typewriters. She probably lent her name to a foreign innovator, but she certaily had superior training and knowledge to be able to be the connecting agent of the firm in Spain in a high tech sector. María participated in the management of other firms and actively participated in women´s rights movements in Spain. She founded and was president, in 1918, of the National Association of Spanish Women, a platform that publically asked for the reform of Spanish civil and criminal codes and an improvement of women´s rights.91

Women managers of foreign firms in Spain disappeared with the Francoist regime. With the legal and socioeconomic changes experienced in Spain since the late 1970s and particularly since the 1980s women´s participation in the management of public and private firms, as salaried workers or self-employed entrepreneurs has increased in the official statistics, despite the fact that self-employment of women, alone or organized in groups has been, as we have said, an old experience in the Spanish economy, as in many other areas of the world. In a study about firm creation, of a sample of 800 firms born in 1998 and still in existence in 2001, 34 per cent of the partners were women and 66 per cent men. Most of the partners, 46,3 per cent, had university studies and 33,3 per cent secondary s tudies, though 32,6 per cent of the firms were created without previous experience in the creation or management of a firm. The main reason to create the firm was said to be the wish to become one´s boss and be self-employed, a reason some tudies relate particularly to women´s willingness to escape from unfavourable previous labour conditions.92

Because in critical situations unfavourable labour conditions increase, especially for women, this would mean that figures about women entrepreneurs will keep rising, providing innovative and credit requirements can be fulfilled. 91 These data about patents come from the above-mentioned unpublished book from P. Saiz et al., whose generous contribution is greatly acknowledged.92 This data comes from the Confederation of Spanish Chambers of Commerce used by Berta Moreno –Centro de Estudios Económicos Tomillo- (2003), Mujer y Empresa en el siglo XXI. El papel de la Consolidación Empresarial. Seminar at the Cámara de Comercio de Madrid, Madrid, 29th April 2003

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An interesting case of woman manager in recent times in Spain is that of Núria Basi, who during the 1980s worked in the Center for Research and Applied Development of Santa Perpetua de la Mogoda, owned by a German multinational, and when the Germans left the firm she contributed to its survival in the new firm Cidesal. However, she left the firm in 1994 and moved to the United States to work in the field of robotics applied to processes and offered consulting services to the U.S. pharmaceutical sector, and returned to Spain in 1998 to work in the management of the family firm Armand Basi –who manufactures under license Lacoste products and owns the brand name Armand Basi. Núria Basi is today one of the four women who share with 56 men the managing council of the major Catalan entrepreneurial association Fomento del Trabajo Nacional.93

The European Union is promoting with public policies and investment all sorts of women´s entrepreneurial activity, as the EU Lisbon Conference of 2000 recently made clear. However, and as an alternative to unemployment based on gender discrimination in the labour market and the lack of public investment to care for the children and the elderly, this promotion is particularly addressed to encourage women to create small enterprises with few or non-salaried workers. Spain is also practicing this social policy, and women are entering this path to avoid combination of labour market discriminatory experiences in terms of salary, dead-end jobs or lack of promotion, mobbing, sexual harassment, and equilibrium with family life realities. By 2003, female workers represented a 40,78% of the active population -38,78% of the total occupied population, showing a bigger share than men in unemployement-, a very low figure compared to other European countries. Only 30,51% of self-employed were women in that year, and only 21,93% of all self-employed with employees were women, while this percentage rises to 30,51% to self-employed without employees and –not surprisingly- to 65,86% to the self-employed who were providing “family help”. Despite there is still room for growth, there is also the possibility of a decrease. When comparing 2003 data with 2002, we find a reduction in the percentage of female self-employed with and without employees. From 25,76% and 46,37% in 2002, to 21,93 and 30,51

93 La Vanguardia, Sunday 26 January 2003, p.67.

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in 2003.94 These figures suggests that “self-employment” is not in itself a sign of promotion and progress for women entrepreneurship, since a gender segregation by sector and conditions remain. It seems that the Spanish case during the last ten years indicates that economic conditions and labour market regulation get worse for the weakest segments of the labour market, which according to figures are women, young people, the elderly, and inmigrants. In fact, Spain had the highest rate of temporarity within the labour market, and women are particularly visible in this rate. Not only gender differences on unemployment rise but also gender differences on self-employement. In this case, the contribution to female work to family firms can be transformed into a renewed situation of backwardness, dependence and invisibility of women´s contribution to entrepreneurship.

Entrenched and old cultural traditions can easily drive women´s work back to the former dominant situation of cheap invisible services, or oppose women´s recent entrepreneurial rights according to the Constitution and the civil codes. An example of such discriminatory traditions is that of the fisherwomen of the Valencia Albufera, where an old tradition prohibited fishermen to transfer fishing rights to women, until 1999. This tradition implied that men who did not have sons could miss the rights of the other members of his family to earn a living, that daughters could not inherit and run the family business, and that widows without sons were condemned to change their lifestyles and did not have even a chance to try to continue the husband´s way of earning a living.95Self-employment and participation in family firms with a social and economic recognition is a big progress looking back at our history, though resistances are commonly found in traditions, in cultural blocks to become members of associations, in institutional holes to provide resources to finance health and care expenses related with children and the elderly, in decisions about sharing power at all levels, and in sexual mobbing and domestic violence. All these resistances have a common link: the difficulties to have access to power.

III.4. A gendered long-lasting difference in access to power

94 These data came from the EPA (Encuesta de Población Activa). 2002 data is for the first three months term of the year.95 Magazine de La Vanguardia, May 9 2004, p. 50.

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The Spanish government never established a Glass-ceiling comission but the foundation of the Instituto de la Mujer in 1983 cannot be underestimated. The Instituto de la Mujer has been very active in the last years, both following especial programs to promote women´s participation in political and economic life, and through campaigns to get society conscious of gender discrimination. Now this is a hot topic on the political agenda and the new Socialist government elected in the March 2004 general elections, is composed by 50% male and 50% female –the president excluded-. This political gesture is important because if we give any credit to human capital theory, individuals will invest in human capital depending on expected returns in the labour market. Obviously, expectations are feeded by social models. The existence of women in political power serves on one hand as a model for possible investment in human capital decision and career commintment by women, and on the other hand, helps to increase sensibility towards problems that within a patriarcal society affect especially to women, such as discrimination in the labour market and in organisations, the identification of the household as a female arena or the domestic violence. To have access to power and to use this power has been a sphere severely forbiden to women, in the household, in the firm, in the political administration and everywhere. Although, now is changing, there is still a room for improvement but also, for deterioration by the re-definition of old gender stereotypes with “new clothes”, as super-woman, the professional who in the top of her career commitment is a super-mother, without making a reflexion on equal rights and duties on paternity and maternity.

In fact, in other to understand power in society and power in business, it is necessary to think about power in the family by positioning at the same level of analysis the family and the market, not only when we study female attitudes and behaviors, but also when we analyse the male ones as such and not as the norm, and the role of institutions modelling this division of society by gender.96 The gendered different access to power within the family has important consequences for labour markets and business participation of male and female. Families will allocate their ressources among their members depending on the future possibilities of these members. If men have greater potential to help economically the

96 Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2004), “Logros y retos del análisis de género en la historia económica de la empresa”, Información Comercial Española, n.812, pp.77-90.

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familiy in the future because they do not suffer the same discrimination women experience in the labour market, the family will invest on their sons more than in their daughters, shapping their economic posibilities in adult life. Apart from differences in human capital formation betweeen boys and girls, men and women, the family division by gender has other important consequences for the market, especially a different use of time, explaining why women and men have been considered as different “natural” economic agents. This naturalisation had important effects on hierarchy and business organisation.

The managerial profession is one of the most interesting ones for explaining the social construction of a profession in relation to gender, family decisions, and time allocation. Employers expect from a manager someone with not only a solid formation (in economics, business, law, foreign languages and other skills and experience), but also some monitoring habilities closely related with the hierarchical organisation of our society as well. The image about the ideal manager coincides with attributes traditionally associated by society to men, and constitutes an obstacle in the relatively recent rapid incorporation of numerous top trained women to the highest ladders of the business hierarchy. In addition, and according to a recent 2004 study of Spanish managers of the Deloitte consulting firm, a managerial position normally implies a great responsibility that is associated with full time commitment, long hours and flexible timetable. Though more men are participating in family responsibilities, statistics reveal family tasks and children care are still mainly a female job. According to the study of the Deloitte consulting firm, men but above all women face today in Spain discriminatory obstacles to be able to meet the flexible timetable required by top management.97

Demand side discrimination –the ideal male attributes of the manager-, and supply side discrimination –different household use of time- explain the low

97 The conclusions about the Deloitte study have been summarized by Enrique de la Villa, partner of Deloitte and responsible person of the Human Capital area, in La Vanguardia, Sunday 11 July 2004, p.26 of section “Dinero”, in the article “Políticas de conciliación. ¿La familia? bien, gracias. Equilibrar vida profesional y privada es un deseo legítimo pero casi imposible de alcanzar”. In the same newspaper and page Carlos Obeso, ESADE professor and director of the Instituto de Estudios Laborales, declared that the increase in the number of working hours per day of top managers is not the main factor of conflict to combine a job with personal and family life, but rather to work during week-ends, school vacation, at night or in holidays.

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proportion of female in high managerial positions, despite the removal of legal obstacles and the advance in training.

For traditional entrepreneurs children are a female job, and thefore women with children are supposed to lack exclusive dedication to a firm where they are employed. According to studies about perceptions of female employees by traditional employers, women supposedly share some defined permanent characteristics such as lack of ambition, fears about taking decisions and assuming risks, high emotivity and unsecurity, lack of flexibility and adaptation to change. To sum up, lack of capacity to manage. According to these studies even the language or the productivity gifts used in a firm contribute to establish supposed male capacity and female inferiority (“Sr. García” in front of “María José”; women receiving a smaller car than a male colleague´s car to allow women easier parking, women assigned the order of office material while men are appointed to decision-taking responsibilities).98 From these premises, to select or to promote a woman for a managerial responsibility is a bet, a wager, a risk which needs to be constantly reinforced, justified, and argumented. In addition to the non-written law of 24h timetable for managers, it is in relation to promotion where the searching for equals operates more frequently, and as a matter of fact male networks are useful tools for promotion. Women are out of these networks and lack of female models. However, things are changing both in the demand side and in the supply side, jointly with an institutional framework which supports and promotes women full participation in economic life.

On the demand side, business publications indicate a change in the demand for managers towards a more interactive model. Firms would be looking for alternatives to the authoritarian –male- managerial model. The “theorical” justification for this demand shift is an assumed female superiority in certains fields, including the way they lead, which would be interactive and more altruistic, instead of the male one characterised by being hierarchical-authoritarian.99 However, empirical studies show more similarities than differences in the way men and women lead, especially because they are formed in the same business schools, where at least in the

98 All these example and stereotypes comes from a empirical work made by Gómez Esteban in several Spanish Firms and Business Schools. C. Gómez Esteban (2000), “¿Subordinadas o Tiranas? Imágenes de la mujer en puestos de responsabilidad laboral”, Conocimiento, mujer, poder: las mujeres en los espacios del saber y la autoridad UIMP, Sevilla.99 See Judy Rosener , “Ways Women Lead”, Harvard Business Review, nov-dec 119-25

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Spanish case, the ideal manager is still described with attributes which are socially considered as male100. In addition, we cannot forget, gender differences are socially constructed and not naturally determined. In fact, this line of thought in business publications uses the stereotypes the gender approach tries to fight. If female stereotypes are not useful to discriminate women, they must not be used to promote them, because it could help now with a specific demand framework, but possibly not if the situation changes. Whether these demand changes are real or only are hiding other demand changes which are acting strongly on labour market changes by gender, is something that need more analysis.101 The protagonism of women in business must be related to changes in the international economy as well as demographic and human capital formation.

Changes in the international economy, demographic changes and human capital formation changes by gender that started in most Western countries from the 1970s could serve as argument for explaining the increased number of female managers. With the globalisation in the 1980s and the information society, a rising demand for qualified personnel started. Technological revolution is producing new professions which are not stereotyped as male or female professions and women with sufficient qualifications can access those positions. This is so because while these changes in international economy were taking place, universities were producing more and more female graduates in economics, finance, business and law. The “incorporation” of women to business –though it will be better to say to management, since women as men have always been present in business- started to be considered a necessity in order to take profit of all this human capital they are acumulating.102 However, we have 100 C Gómez Esteban (2000) maintains that although leadership is presented in Spanish business school as an achivement, in reality what students identify with the leader is a new version of the charismatic leader based on natural attitudes which normally coincides with “male” ones: “El líder … hombre curtido (…) con hidalguía desbordante y lleno de bonhomía”. C. Gómez Esteban (2000), “¿Subordinadas o Tiranas? Imágenes de la mujer en puestos de responsabilidad laboral”, Conocimiento, mujer, poder: las mujeres en los espacios del saber y la autoridad UIMP.101 See for an analysis on the interaction between supply and demand changes in changing gender role in business, Lina Gálvez Muñoz (2004), “Logros y retos del análisis de género en la historia económica de la empresa”, Información Comercial Española, n.812, pp.77-90.102 Felice Schwartz publications were a turning point, since it was well accepted by the business elite, although strongly criticised by feminist for following a “Mommy Track”. She said to have a female manager was more expensive for the firm than to have a man, but it was worthy because if business did not use this human capital it will not be making a rational use of their human resources. F. Schwartz (1989), “Management women and the new facts of life”, Harvard Business Review, 89 (1), 119-125; and from the same author (1992), Breaking with tradition: women and work, the new facts of life, New York, Warner.

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to wait until the 1990s when this need became –or was justified as- a comparative advantage. This incorporation of women to high managerial positions is not the consequence of a feminist reinvindication for equality, a terminology difficult to accept in business world, but it is considered a competitive advantage, and competition is not only an acceptable word but a queen word in business dictionary. The trendy concept of “diversity” which implies the incorporation of “others” to business world –women and ethnic minorities- is considered a competitive advantage for firms and countries, as we could see in publications and mainly, in the way those firms projected their image. Many business school have included in their curriculum Managing Diversity subjects despite the education students receive does not follow a gender approach. Obviously, this “diversity” argument is in fact a result of the new requirements of the deep changes in technology, international trade, demographic and human capital formation that are affecting the organisation of firms in the last decades.

To all these changes which are favouring an increased demand for women, we have to add that women continue to be a preferred type of worker for several positions because they still are cheaper than men, since the gender gap has not completely disapeared in any country all over the world.103 In addition of being a cheaper worker than men, women are more flexible and as a matter of fact, more convenient for markets which are less and less rigid, especially thanks to the new technologies. On that sense, part-time commitment is the ideal solution for society –and governments- to make compatible family life and market life –saving demographic rates and tax returns-, however, we should ask ourselves if it is necessarily the best solution for women. That means that the gender division of society is still a main component on economic and business organisation, and that changes that are happening now will need years or decades to have effects on real equality among women and men. In fact, one could ask, to what extent there is a real decrease in the significance of gender as C. Goldin asserts.104

Still, on the supply side and in addition to demographic and human capital formation changes (especially about the effects of technological change, especially in communications, which are making the labour

103 See Francine Blau, Marianne Ferber and Anne Winkler (2002), The economics of women, men and work, Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, and ILO (2003), Time for Equality, Geneve, ILO.104 Claudia Goldin (2002), The rising and declining of the significance of gender. NBER (WP) 8915, 2002

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journely more flexible and even changing the female labour supply), female labour supply is also affected by very slow changes in gender domestic roles, allowing more “free” time to women who want to advance in their careers and, as men do, do not feel compelled to choose between having a family or having a professional career. In that respect, probably one of the most interesting research possibilities, is to place family and firms at the same level of analyisis for explaining masculinity and male managers. In fact, there are no analyisis explaining male managerial careers through their espouses role in production and reproduction in the household leaving their husbands free to use their full time to their working remunerated commitments.105 In fact, this subject is becoming an important one recently, as a answer to a practical problem of lack of expatriate managers who find difficult to make working for long periods abroad and their spouses careers compatible 106. Women are becoming ideal candidates for such positions in many firms. The case of Núria Basi treated in the previous section is an example. However, she is certainly exceptional in the Spanish business arena, though not unique, due to the scarce number of Spanish women who occupy top managerial responsibilities in big firms in Spain or abroad.

According to the official statistics of the Encuesta de Población Activa from I.N.E., of the total number of women managers of public and private firms in 2003 only 18,17 per cent of them managed public and private firms with 10 or more workers. In that year women were only 4,6% of the total managers who worked for firms included in the IBEX stock market (in the U.S. comparable figures would give an approximate 20 per cent). If we consider the 10 most important firms in the IBEX, in 2002 only 2 of them included women in the councils.107

105 On July 2004, a British judge, has considered that an exwife of an Arsenal football player needed to received a higher pension than established in origin, after the divorce, because she was responsible for his emotional stability and as a matter of fact, his triumphs as football player. El País 7th July 2004.106 See recent international management text books such as H. Deresky (2002), International management: managing across borders and cultures, 4th ed, Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, pp.377-84. Female competitive advantages based on female stereotypes can be seen in F. Tropenaars and Y. Hampen-Tunden (1998), Riding the waves of culture. Understanding diversity in global business, New York, McGraw-Hill.107 According to Rosa Cullell, while she worked as “directora general adjunta” of the credit institution La Caixa, in her report to the XII International Women´s Summit of Barcelona of 2002. The figure was published in El Pais, Saturday 13 July 2002, p.53. In 2003 the total occupied active population in Spain was, in thousands, 16.862 (women, 6.538,9); managers of public and private firms with more than 10 salaried employees 1.253,1 (women, 385,3). These data can be obtained through the Instituto de la Mujer web page, based on E.P.A. figures.

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In a few cases we do find Spanish women in big foreign corporations, like María Marced. Marced mentionned in the previous section, who lived in Germany and England, and who was in 2002 the General Director of INTEL for Europe, Middle East and Africa, and world vicepresident of INTEL in the sales and marketing sections. According to The Wall Street Journal Europe she could be considered the third most influential woman entrepreneur in Europe. Her case and the new jobs opened for Spanish women who get degrees from Economics and Business Schools suggest that globalization and work in TNCs are providing new opportunities to get top manageurial jobs to Spanish women entrepreneurs.108 In addition, the increasing presence of women in business schools could imply the introduction on informal business networks which have proved to be so important historically for explaining business development. On that respect, in the World Women Summit of Barcelona 2002, the creation of female lobbies was considered as one of the solutions to increase the participation of women in power.

Whether the solution for achieving more equality is the creation of female lobbies or the affirmative action, this is something we will see in the next future. In any case, in order to combat the different treatment female and male received in the labour market, in firms and in private and public institutions, some aspects regarding stereotypes before entering the labour market and non-working time needs to be challenged, such as differences in human capital formation –a different election of university degrees between women and men-, and especially a redistribution of time and power within the family. What is clear is that the division of power within the family, and the role of institutions shaping the division of society by gender, are the two most outstanding factors that need to be taken into account to understand firms from a gender perspective. This is especially important for developing countries where women access to power, and as a matter of fact to human capital formation and even to a wage for living is far from being reached, and explain the general problem of the feminization of poverty.

108 About Marced see El Pais, Sunday 28 July 2002, p.15.

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IV. Conclusions and AgendaWere Spanish women totally absent from business activity and

economic life in the last two centuries? The answer to the question we asked ourselves in the introduction is no. Spanish business history during the last two centuries cannot be considered the work of the “most audatious and creative men” either from a theoretical or empirical point of view.

Newinstitutional and evolutionary approaches, together with ideas from network analysis and recent business history that applies gender concepts provide theoretical tools that confirm the complexity of entrepreneurship. Each society presents at different times a diverse definition of the group of individuals that develop economic activities, depending on the existing rules of the game and the available opportunities. From this same viewpoint innovation may take place through a combination of technological, organisational, and institutional conditions historically determined that change among territories. W. Lazonick, L. Galambos, and R. Granovetter all coincide in ackwnoledging the importance of informal groupings and networkings in business creation and innovation. The role of such groups and networks in women´s firms in the services sector in the U.S. and in some western European countries has been outlined in business history analysis that take gender as a major theoretical approach.

The Spanish economy experienced rapid structural change relatively late compared with other western countries. Occupation rates by sector and gender indicate the growth of the services sector as industry progressed, during the decades before the 1930s, and the rising presence of women in official statistics about the tertiary sector while this double growth of industry and services was taking place. This progress was abruptly stopped in 1936, until the early 1960s, due to Franco´s dictatorship (1939-1975), which increased the distance of Spanish economic indicators from OECD countries in terms of GDP and industrial growth. It was only after the progressive participation of the Spanish economy in the international economy, and structural changes affecting this country since the early 1960s and above all after the 1980s, that the official registration and the process of equalitarian rights at all levels in business life of women progressed again, while the country experienced a rapid growth of the services sector and an industrialization process.

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The contribution of our paper in that respect, has been to present a critical view of some economic and business history theories with evidences gathered about business and gender for the Spanish case. First, the idea about the tertiarization of the economy, which would follow industrialization. Second, arguments about the reasons to understand the availability of entrepreneurs in Spain.

To begin with the first one, classical studies about the tertiarization of the economy of the 1930s underestimate the role of services within industry, which was more important than it is usually acknowledged, according to our figures about occupation by sector and gender since 1900 and our qualitative empirical data about women´s business specialties since early modern times and particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before the Spanish Civil War women´s work specialized in providing services either for agriculture, industry or the classically-defined tertiary activities. Reforms and changes dating back into the first decade of the 20th century increased the institutional investment and support necessary to have women active in firms either as employees or employers. Prohibitions and restrictions to women´s education, work and civil rights during Franco´s dictatorship sent women back home. However, during Franco´s years women´s specialization in providing services within and outside firms continued, though overwhelmingly unrecorded and at a lower cost for firms, the society and the State than before the beginning of the Spanish civil war in 1936. After the 1980s, institutional investment and support to equalitarian rights to access the labour market regardless gender, and the enormous human capital trained in providing services able to keep just doing that but in a more professional and remunerated way, made women employers and women employees rose rapidly in the official statistics of the services sector. A wide range of case studies presented in this paper reinforce this specialty of women in Spanish business world.

Regarding the second type of arguments, G. Tortella has mentioned in several publications the role that Catholicism and low literacy rates would have played in the relatively lower endowment of entrepreneurs in Spain compared to other western countries. Our contention and data indicate that gender legal and social discrimination did play a rather more important role among the so-called cultural factors about entrepreneurship in Spain. Education at home and at school reinforced during decades low

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rates of girl schooling in Spain and forced girls to acquire knowledge that could be only mainly useful in the world of services, within households and firms. Ironically, this discriminatory education trained girls to become managers of their households, but restricted them the access to management of firms. Education (formal and informal), civil codes, and labour legislation, highly discriminated married women, and created powerful images of male superiority and female inferiority that were applied within households and firms until recently, thus creating strong cultural and long-lasting obstacles to equal promotion in jobs and equal treatment in the labour market. The political priorities that guided the late construction of the welfare State in Spain did not include provisions to care for children and the elderly, which highly increased discriminatory working hours for women as employers or employees in the baby boom years of the 1960s. This factor is clearly behind the dramatic fall in birth rates after the 1970s, when women ended the legal requirement to be dependent on husbands that had existed in Spain since 1889, and when they progressively enjoyed similar rights in the labour market (without State support in reconciling their labour with family responsibilities). In the 1990s and until our days women grandmothers and informal networks of female relatives born in the 1960s help women employers and employees combine jobs and families, yet in a few decades this cheap unregistered way of reconciling double work will end up. Will the policy of giving a few euros to have more babies be enough to keep our women in the labour market, or to stop requiring immigrants with higher fertility rates? Will a complete law regarding gender violence be enough to eliminate ideals of male superiority and female inferiority, and thus stop physical and psychological violence within and outside firms and households in this country?

Discriminatory traditions very much alive within and outside firms, plus déficit zero public policies that will block a necessary increase in social investment to combine family and work loads are undoubtedly two of the major obstacles businesses in Spain must face today to be able to gain competitive advantage from their human capital, the best and more equalitarian from a gender point of view we have had in our history. To be competitive and achieve innovation is something polititians and entrepreneurs in Spain declare to be major targets for our firms. Will our

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small and medium firms acknowledge women´s competitiveness and innovations when women are not relatives of the boss, or despite they are his relatives? Will TNCs, and microfirms in the services sector, the only arena left for competent women entrepreneurs to achieve recognition and promotion in Spain?

In order to fully answer these questions we need to know more about the historical construction of firms, institutions and labour markets from a gender perspective. In Spanish academia, we still are in an early stage for incorporating women in business and business studies. We need to know more about women´s business activity, access to credit, different consumption patterns, and their entrepreneurial activities, how differently they behaved in each economic sector or each geographical area, and how important was the role of the state, other public institutions, or the catholic church controlling until very recently formal and informal education in Spain, in shaping this evolution.

In addition to increase our knowledge on female business activities and possibilities, it is necessary to enlarge our sources and to remake the more commonly used statistics incorporating gender. Spanish women are invisible in Spanish traditional statistics though not in economic activity, as economic agents. This is not an obstacle for making sophisticated analysis on productivity or GDP, or general interpretations on Spanish business activity and entrepreneurship, which need to be challenged. Male behavior is still considered the norm. Men as business and economic agents need to be also analysed as such, yet not as non-gendered agents since their activity was as conditioned by a gender division of labour in the society as women´s activity was.

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