The hand bones studied clearly showed the sex-specific division of labor during industrialization, one of the most formative periods of modern societies. The researchers found an impressive morphological variability in women who had worked as maids or in factories: this corresponded to their diverse activities and changing jobs, a common phenomenon at the time. Women workers with more specific occupations, like seamstresses and tailors, showed distinct characteristics in their hand bones.

It was similar for men who had "gender-typical" occupations. For example, construction workers showed skeletal markings reflecting heavy manual labor and powerful grasping. Men who performed more fine-motor activities, on the other hand, showed bone characteristics indicating frequent precision grasping using the thumb and the index finger.

Reconstructing the history of the division of labor by biological sex is a necessary step for understanding how our society evolved. However, anthropologists were not able to test if the methods they use to investigate the division of labor are reliable due to the absence of female skeletal samples with known lifetime activities. In fact, the occupation of women in previous centuries was poorly archived, often due to the way in which societies in the past perceived women’s labor.