Ivelina Masheva (BG-Swiss Fellowships for Bulgarian Junior Scholars, Oct ‘25 – Jul ‘26):

Women’s Work and (Un)equal pay: The Gender Pay Gap in Bulgarian Industry, 1910s–1940s

22 January 2026 (Thursday), 16:30 h.

Moderated by: Nadezhda Alexandrova

Abstract: The presentation investigates the gender wage gap in Bulgarian industry during the first half of the twentieth century. Chronologically, it begins in the pre–World War I period, when relatively reliable statistics first became available, and concludes in the mid-1940s with the establishment of the state socialist regime. The research focuses on gender wage differentials—that is, the gap between men’s and women’s wages in industrial employment. Preliminary findings suggest that this gap narrowed significantly over the period. Accordingly, the project addresses the following central research question: how and why did men’s and women’s wages in Bulgarian industry converge between the 1900s and the 1940s?

The first objective of the project is to trace the year-by-year evolution of the gender wage gap in Bulgarian industry from the early twentieth century through the end of World War II, insofar as the available statistics permit. In addition to outlining the overall trajectory of the wage gap and its fluctuations over time, the analysis examines internal variations by disaggregating the data by age, economic sector, and other relevant categories. The second objective is to analyse how socio-economic and political contexts shaped industrial wages in gendered ways. To this end, the project explores factors such as wars, economic crises, technological change, and regime shifts in order to explain observed changes in the gender wage gap.