J Cassidy Charts

https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1CF_on_RqFDw3G5kOB-rVqGrs2-3ifkHdsYrnX5jwb78&authuser=0&v=1456252991757&sz=w388-h290-p-k-nu

John Cassidy
2/23/16
Spreadsheet Write-up
HIS 596
For the spreadsheet project I examined the clothing and alcohol industries. The two should offer an interesting compare contrast because according to the census the alcohol industry in 1850 Albany no women were employed in the breweries or distilleries whereas the clothing or textile industry is remembered for employing large numbers of women. What the data revealed however is that within the industry in 1850 is that there were 194 women employed in clothing businesses but this is dwarfed by the 343 men also employed in clothing. Moving on to income the median wages in the overall cleaned census was $104 for men and $40 for women, what is important to realize with these numbers are that this is the median of wages paid out by a business not individual salaries so the average wage would be considerably lower. The $64 difference between the two figures still shows a heavy preference toward males when it comes to income this coupled with the massive gap in employment in clothing which is considered a large employer of women confirms bias toward the idea of the male head of household being the primary earner. Something else shown in the data is that the alcohol industry was a skilled profession, in the overall population the median male wage was $104 but in the alcohol business the median wage was $162 which is a 64% difference in wages. This 64% gap shows that alcohol was a skilled profession because in addition to the overall pool of wages being larger only 123 men worked in this industry so fewer workers shared a larger amount pool of money leading to a significantly higher average wage for alcohol. Lastly in regard to wages the clothing industry paid its women $40 which according to the data was exactly the average wage for a woman in the Albany era in 1850. For men in the clothing industry the $104 they were paid while noticeably higher than their female coworkers is also exactly the median for men of their era so what we see is that on both sides of gender the textile workers fall exactly in to the middle of earners by business but with their high numbers the take home per person would be below the median displayed by the data particularly for women as clothing contains a large percentage of the overall employed female population. Also the two industries combined paid out $25776.60 out of Albany’s total payout of $30643.60 according to the cleaned census but as it is again a sanitized data pool so the true ratio is most likely much less one sided. Regardless the data does show that the two industries produced a very significant portion of the gross product of the city in 1850. This coincides with data I found detailing Albany’s place as a major center for breweries in the pre-prohibition era particularly because America’s current beer capital Milwaukee was still a developing area and with the lack of refrigeration made transporting a perishable commodity like beer to or from the East Coast to the Midwest and Albany’s location close to the Eastern seaboard and the river access provided by the Hudson River allowed the Albany breweries to rapidly bring their products to major markets.