WOMEN IN ILLINOIS INDUSTRIES 
3 
In all, 429 establishments, employing a total of 142,745 workers, 
were visited throughout the entire State. A very large proportion 
of the women actually covered by the survey (59.7 per cent) were 
employed in Chicago. This proportion, however, is a normal and 
representative one, for according to the census in 1920 almost one- 
half of all the people over 10 years of age who were gainfully employed 
in Illinois were located in Chicago; and 57.6 per cent of the gainfully 
employed women of the State were grouped in that one center. 
Ses one-third (35.1 per cent) of the workers employed in the plants 
visited were women or girls. It is to be expected that the propor- 
tion of women on the pay rolls of the NL visited would 
exceed that for the State as a whole. As the study was concerned 
primarily with facts relating to women in industry, those industries 
were included in which women constituted a relatively important 
part of the labor force. 
The women surveyed were employed in 31 manufacturing indus- 
tries, in stores, in laundries, and in hotels and restaurants. There 
were 14 industry groups in each of which more than a thousand 
women were reported. The 10 industries employing most of the 
women included arranged in the order of the number of women 
employees, are as follows: Electrical appliances; general mercantile 
establishments; jewelry, including clocks and watches; men's cloth- 
ing; boots and shoes; metal products; slaughtering and meat pack- 
ing; “other textiles’; printing and publishing; and knit goods.