The 1970's will be characterised by women's militancy and particularly by struggles to implement equal pay demands. Already Barbara Castle has shown how the equal pay demand can be emasculated and turned back as a weapon against the working class as a whole. The abstract slogan of equal pay is no longer sufficient; the demand has to be specifically situated in a total strategy that radically challenges not only the pay structure but the structure of employment within capitalism and consequently capitalist education and training in its entirety.
The women's liberation struggle requires a large amount of sociological and theoretical analysis to enable the militants to evolve a radical anti-capitalist strategy. A welcome addition to the literature on the women's struggle is the ATTI working party report on "Education, Training and Employment of Women and Girls." The following arguments base themselves to a large extent on the facts provided in that document.
In considering the secondary education system, it is easily shown that the percentage of passes at A and O level is roughly the same for boys and girls. The disparity occurs when the distribution of candidates between subjects is considered. Arts subjects are still thought to be the proper study for womankind.
Table of O and A level passes (Statistics of Education, 1967). Columns: 1956 O, 1956 A, 1967 O, 1967 A.
Mathematics — Boys: 54,611 / 13,927 / 102,417 / 354,661; Girls: 2,792 / 1,846 / 51,072 / 6,751
Physics — Boys: 20,076 / 12,677 / 45,270 / 24,295
Chemistry — Boys: 17,493 / 10,136 / 35,037 / 16,625; Girls: 3,910 / 1,828 / 10,942 / 4,545
These figures show the extent the curricula of girls and consequently their job opportunities are restricted on the scientific front. This restriction becomes more oppressive for the working class girl. One fifth of the O level physics entry are girls whereas only one-fifteenth of the CSE (the exam for the "non-academic") physics candidates are girls.
Much of the debate on women's education has been hampered by what seems to be anachronistic references to the discredited faculty psychology: girls are better at sewing than boys; boys are better at maths than girls; or vice versa. This type of approach does not appear to be very useful and therefore I have not thought it necessary to redress the balance, but to continue with the same methodology by combing through the literature to show areas where women are more capable than men. The working hypothesis will be that men and women have roughly the same potentialities and capacities. Therefore gross deviations from this norm are functions of societal pressures rather than innate differences between the sexes. This hypothesis is useful even if incorrect; it has its thrust towards changing society, which can be altered, rather than a passive reference to "unalterable" sexual characteristics.
The Robbins report tried to deal with the problem of academic wastages. It identified as a major component in this wastage, early leaving from school. The majority of the early leavers were working class and it was working class girls who suffered most severely. However, the report saw a gradual reversal of this trend. In 1963 the report estimated that 16.8% of boys would remain at school until the age of 17 in 1967. This estimate was substantially correct. The percentage of girls was estimated at 12.6%, This underestimated the actual proportion of girls staying on by 2% - an error of underestimation of nearly 10%. This "expansionist" document underestimated the achievement girls in all of its major predictions. Two points have to be made: the report and the official opinion it represents obviously was not that committed to achieving equality of performance between boys and girls; the increasing performance of girls is good but these are almost exclusively middle-class females and education life span is not automatically related to occupational status.
Further education is a particularly important avenue of academic advancement for working class girls and has a high correlation to employment opportunity. And yet, in no area of the education system are women at such a disadvantage. This is not surprising as further education is arrested by the crude sexual discrimination of capitalist industry than the artificial "increase" of the single sex grammar schools. The following table from "Statistics of Education, 1967", illustrates the extent of the problem.
Further Education — Men / Women: Engineering 30,260 / [illegible]; [illegible] 11,555; [illegible] technology [illegible]; [illegible] 18,126 / 3,119; Social Administration and Business Studies 6,133 / 6,129.
The 1964 industrial training act was to remedy this imbalance; at least Lady Williams invoked this rhetoric on several occasions. Has it done this? The first problem is that very few statistics exist on this subject. The Ministry of Labour's 1967 analysis of occupations of workers in manufacturing industries showed that significant improvements had occurred in the training of women workers. The 1968 "Survey of Women Employment" showed that on-the-job training had been received for only about one type of work in six by respondents of the survey. Only one type of work in fifty involved an apprenticeship. When the Industrial Training Boards have made recommendations for training, they have made no reference to discrimination against women. This is regarded as a matter for self congratulation: "schemes are designed to improve the quantity and quality of training by types of employment but not occupational status, by sex."
The day release situation is deplorable. The 1964 report of the Henniker-Heaton committee showed that 24.4% of boys and 6.4% of girls in employment under the age of 18 got day release in 1959-60. By 1968 the figures were 36.3% and 0.2% respectively. The relative proportions have not changed. Analysis of those industries with a large female work force is very disturbing. In textiles, the proportion of women under 16 with day release is 2.4% in clothing and footwear, 2.44%, and in distribution 2%. This final figure represents a drop since 1959 of .5%.
The situation in education and training shows overall a minute amelioration but it is still a vast distance away from parity. It is job structure, however, which is crucial. Very important evidence comes from the DEP's Manpower Studies No. 6: "Occupational Change 1951-61." The proportion of women proprietors, Managers, administrators and executives fell from 19.4% to 18.6%; in higher and professional/technical occupations from 33.9% to 31.1%; in lower professional/technical from [illegible] to 43.2% and in skilled manual workers from 15.5% to 13.9%. The percentage of women in semi-skilled and unskilled manual work rose from 40.5 to 41 and from 28.7 to 32.7 respectively. Over this period the trend has been for the proportion of women in skilled work to drop and for the proportion in unskilled work to grow. Unskilled work, most particularly office work where the percentage of women rose from 55.7% to 60.1%, is exceptionally sensitive to redundancy flowing from increased automation. The Ministry of Labour "Computers in Offices" gives figures that allow one to predict that by 1974 there will be substantial inroads into the total number of office jobs nationally available. It would not be excessively alarmist to point out that these tendencies could lead to sections of women workers becoming "unemployable."
This growing discrimination against women, on one level of rationality does not make sense for capitalism; "Status of Women in Sweden 1968" calculates that the Swedish national income would be increased by 25% by utilising the unused labour potential of women, and by 50% if sex discrimination were abolished. The inevitable irrationalities capitalist production rejects the logic of planned and full use of labour as surely as they reject the full and social use of the fruits of that labour.
But reformist utopias have to be avoided for reasons other than their non-validity. It is totally impermissible for Marxists to lead a struggle for the right of all women to be exploited equally with men workers. The struggle is against exploitation as such. And that is where we break with Fabian schemes to get housewives into factories. The slogan "Equal Pay, Now!" has a transitional nature, but we must also point out to the vanguard women militants that it is primarily equal pay that is cutting back the proportion of skilled women workers. Given the choice between employing at equal pay, a man or a woman, capitalism takes the male worker; better training and equal pay for women must be fought for, but women's equality lies outside the grasp of reformist politics.