title: How did women count? A note on gender-specific age heaping differences in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
abstract: The role of human capital in economic growth is now largely uncontested. One indicator of human capital frequently used for the pre-1900 period is age heaping, which has been increasingly used to measure gender-specific differences. In this note, we find that in some historical samples, married women heap significantly less than unmarried women. This is still true after correcting for possible selection effects. A possible explanation is that a percentage of women adapted their ages to that of their husbands, hence biasing the Whipple index. We find the same effect to a lesser extent for men. Since this bias differs over time and across countries, a consistent comparison of female age heaping should be made by focusing on unmarried women.
authors.affiliation: University of Debrecen, Utrecht University.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Földvári
authors.forename: Bas
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Van Leeuwen
authors.forename: Jieli
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Van Leeuwen-Li
mesh_terms: D003710:Demography / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history; D004467:Economics / Q000266:history; D005783:Gender Identity; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D017533:Marital Status / Q000208:ethnology; D014930:Women / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D016387:Women's Health / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history; D014933:Women's Rights / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence