Since the late 19th century, more than a third of the work force in the Swiss watch industry has been women, according to statistics from the Swiss government.
Yet you wouldn’t know it from exploring the Musée International d’Horlogerie, a brutalist architecture monument with wavelike walls in the watchmaking city of La Chaux-de-Fonds.
Four women are named, acknowledged for enameling and other specialty skills, but none of the museum’s almost 4,000 watches and clocks on permanent exhibition are signed by female watchmakers.
Even in 2024, women are seldom recognized by the industry or its historical institutions because “it is a very male-dominated industry,” said Nathalie Marielloni, the museum’s vice curator.
And at the museum, “we never really fought for gender issues,” she said, adding that she was not aware of any horological museums in Europe with a different approach.
Yet Ms. Marielloni echoed the government’s statistics. “Just look at the numbers,” she said. “In Switzerland in 1882, there were 3,017 people working in production in the watch industry, and 35 percent were women. In 1944, there were 17,822 — 48 percent were women,” she said, adding that in 1964, employment had risen to 32,879, 52 percent of them women.
More current statistics show a similar trend.
In September 2023, there were 45,953 employees, 43 percent of whom were women, according to an email from Philippe Pegoraro, head of the economic and statistical department at the Foundation of the Swiss Watch Industry.
Ms. Marielloni said she and her colleagues “were in a shock” when, as they were interviewed for this article, they realized the lack of women in the museum’s exhibitions. “We never acknowledged the issue,” she said, “and historically it was always like this — we didn’t really question it.”
Les Petites Mains
There is one group of women included in the museum’s displays: Les petites mains, or the little hands, shown in a mural painted by the Swiss artist Hans Erni for the Swiss national pavilion at Expo 58, the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.
The term still is used for skilled artisans in couture ateliers throughout Europe, but in this case, it generally refers to the young, mostly single, women who arrived from other countries, primarily Italy, after World War II and were hired by watch factories.
The well-organized Swiss watch industry mounted a campaign to attract them, with advertising, some train and bus services to Switzerland and an effort by company executives and unions to work with Swiss authorities on granting work permits. Within a few years, according to the Swiss Federal Statistics Office, 20 percent of the industry’s female work force was of foreign origin and by 1970 the proportion had risen to 32 percent.
Ms. Marielloni’s paternal grandmother was one of those women. “My grandmother arrived from Italy in 1946. She was 21 years old and came to La Chaux-de-Fonds to work on the assembly lines,” she said. “The petites mains were not trained or educated; it was all about learning on the job by doing what your colleagues do.”
While the work provided a paycheck, it was not without risk. “My grandmother lost a finger stamping ébauche watch parts. This one,” Ms. Marielloni said, holding up her left ring finger. “But she still had one phalanx left, so she could wear her wedding ring.” (Ébauche is the term for watch parts before they are polished and finished.)
Now, Ms. Marielloni said, “I am thinking about if we could make an exhibition about the petite mains in a couple of years from now.”
The Pioneers
Stéphanie Lachat, a Swiss historian who specializes in watchmaking, wrote her doctoral thesis on “Les Pionnières du Temps,” or “Female Pioneers of Time,” looking at the period between 1870 and 1970.
“The female work force at the factories were pioneers,” she said, “because it is the first time a lot of women could have an intensive professional life accepted by society.
“But of course, given the times, they also remained the mother and the wife, taking care of the children and the household in parallel; the double duty for women. Step by step, this double duty moved up the social ladder to also include bourgeois women. It also spread to other industries.”
In the early years of the 20th century, Dr. Lachat said, Swiss watchmaking schools allowed women to take some classes, including training as a régleuse, the worker who adjusted watch hairsprings and fine-tuned the accuracy of the balance on high-quality timepieces such as chronometers. (Women’s smaller hands were said to be better suited to the work.)
These female régleuses worked at brands such as Longines, Heuer, Breitling and Omega, companies that had been hiring female workers for their factories since the 1870s. “In 1930 there were 2,777 regulators in the industry,” Dr. Lachat said. “Only 322 of them were male.”
In 1933, Geneva became the first Swiss canton (state) to allow women to graduate from watchmaking programs; other cantons would wait until the 1960s. And before the 1970s, graduation photographs at Swiss watchmaking schools might include two or three women. “Today, women represent a third at watchmaking educations” in Switzerland, Ms. Marielloni said.
Just as educational opportunities were limited, so was women’s pay. “In the 1870s, wages for women could be half of what men made; in the 1920s, women’s wages were at least a third lower, and in the 1950s, 20 percent lower,” said Dr. Lachat, who also noted that women could not vote in Swiss national elections until 1971.
Pay structures changed in 1981, with Swiss legislation stating that women and men have the right to equal pay for equal work.
But Dr. Lachat said that the legislation had not resolved the problem. “It is difficult for a female worker to file a complaint against your boss, and it is difficult to win,” she said. “The employer can say that the lower pay is not based on gender, but, for instance, because of age, education, different tasks, or that you don’t perform the work as quickly.”
Far Less Attention
While the advances invented by such horology pioneers as Abraham-Louis Breguet are the subject of numerous books and exhibitions, women’s roles have gotten far less attention.
For example, historians, including Alexandra Hutter, the head of the horological museum Uhrenmuseum Beyer in Zurich, have noted that the 18th-century French royal clockmaker Jean-André Lepaute would have struggled without the help of his wife, the self-taught astronomer Nicole-Reine Lepaute.
When it came to clocks, Ms. Hutter said, “Nicole-Reine Lepaute did all the astronomical research and the math; her husband just built it.” Yet Google his name, and more likely to come up as his watchmaking partner is his brother, Jean-Baptiste.
One of the couple’s most spectacular pieces, which can be seen at the Uhrenmuseum Beyer, is a planetarium table clock finished around 1770. The clock is nestled on the base while, above it, a glass globe houses representations of five planets and the moon that circle the sun in real time.
But the museum’s label does not identify Nicole-Reine Lepaute as a co-creator of the clock. “Now it is on my to-do list,” said Ms. Hutter, who arrived at the museum in January. “Now I have done more research about women in the industry.” She also said she planned to mount an exhibition about female clockmakers in two or three years.
The planetarium clock was not the only project on which the husband and wife collaborated. In 1775 they worked with the astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande on a book, “Traité d’horlogerie,” or “Treatise on Clockmaking.”
And while Lalande later acknowledged her contributions, Nicole-Reine Lepaute was not named as an author.
But then in 1760 she hadn’t been acknowledged as an author, along with Lalande and the astronomer Alexis-Claude Clairaut, of “Theories de comète,” or “Comet Theories,” even though she had done many computations for the volume.
In 1935, however, a lunar crater was named for her and, in 1960, an asteroid.
Selling the Time
There are also some women whose unusual connections to time have made a greater impact on the public, at least in their own era.
For example, Ruth Belville, known as the Greenwich Time Lady, ran a successful business until 1940 in London by, essentially, selling time.
Her father, who worked at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich, had started a simple business in 1836. Each week he would have the observatory certify his chronometer pocket watch, which was accurate to within one tenth of a second, and then he sent the watch to subscribers to ensure that their clocks had the correct time.
Ms. Belville took over the business in 1892, doing the rounds herself. And despite that the BBC began broadcasting the time in 1924 and a Speaking Clock phone service was introduced in 1936, she continued to run the business for almost 50 years.
She used the same pocket watch as her father, Ref. 485/786, which was made by the 18th-century English watchmaker John Arnold — nicknamed “The Arnold,” said Bertrand Savary, the chief executive of the watch brand Arnold & Son. (The Arnold company, founded in 1762, had faded in the late 1880s, but was revived in 1995.)
“Ruth was a fantastic businesswoman. To provide such an abonnement [subscription] shows that she was already smart,” Mr. Savary said. “She was able to fulfill a need in the market, the need of a population to have their watches on time.”
And, he added, if a watch was not working properly, she also offered a repair service — although he said that company research had not determined whether she did the work herself. “For us the watch, No. 485/786, is a very good story,” he said, “related to our history, which can now be seen in the Science Museum in South Kensington, London.”
Still Forgotten
To Dr. Lachat, the Swiss historian, there are several reasons many women are still forgotten in horological history.
“History is written by mostly male historians and the brands, and it is really a traditional, male world,” she said. “If you want to to see the women in watchmaking history, you have to look at social history. But the bosses in the industry and the big collectors, they are not interested in such topics.
“They want to speak about products, leaders, business history, different calibers, different watches — not about the conditions of workers, and then you don’t see the women. The young Italian ladies, it is not a glorious subject.” But today, Dr. Lachat added, she senses a growing interest in recognizing women.
“The industry understands that it is a good point for diversity to include women from different backgrounds,” she said. “The watch industry is not only for white men.”
