Industrial, Regional, and Gender Divides in British Unemployment Between the Wars

Despite a substantial body of literature on the severe unemployment crisis in interwar Britain, our understanding of its distributional impacts remains limited. Using newly-digitized government data, this paper analyzes the gender, industrial, and regional composition of unemployment from 1923–1936. I find that the unemployment rate was higher for men in a strongly gender-segmented labor market, that unemployment was widespread across industries and not just a product of the declining staple industries, and that regional unemployment differentials cannot be primarily attributed to regions’ varying industrial compositions. These results offer a deeper and more disaggregated view of this mass unemployment episode