by Elizabeth Orna 'T’ hried having male assistants at first...but it didn't work. They tend to be too independent: men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of the boss. They don't mind working ovetime, they are more loyal and they can take criticism better', (Interview with Robert Maxwell, MP, The Times, 23 October 1968) 'Men today, as they have historically, provide the hardware for our society - the machines, the banking system, the technology -which makes America strong. Who then takes care of the software of society - the values, the faith, the sense of individual worth?' (Dr, G.E. Myers, President, Monticello College, Illinois) These two fairly sickening quotations, from moderately eminent citizens on either side of the Atlantic, epitomise the jumble of assumptions about femine qualities and roles that makes a nasty mess of mich discussion about the education, training and employment of women - cven smong well-disposed persons who are anxious to inmprove the situation... The status of female jobs correspnds to some very general ideas - probably medieval in derivation - about femine character. Many men, and a good number of women, think of women as patient, loyal, dextrous, unadvernturous, conforming, modest, unassertive. By some happy dispensation these are qualities appropriate to the low-level, often repetitive, intellectually undemanding and subordinate jobs in which women mainly work, This can make a very gratifying justification of what exists all about us. Women are in the kind of jobs they are because they have the qualities that fit them for those jobs, and such jobs are about the right limit for female employment. If the situation is seen in those terms, the only problem is to see that deficiencies in training for "women's jobs" are made good, and to give ;irls more compensatory, home- and family-orented education, after which no doubt the men can get on with providing the hardware in their own inimitable way. Viewing it in that light, however, looks remarkably like rationalising backwards from an existing situation until justification is found for leaving it that way - a long-favoured technique among those doing all right out of the status quo. I hope to show in this article that the existing situation is an unbalanced one, dangerous for the national economy and offering a fairly grim prospect for the female part of the population, especially the younger generations, and that it can only be improved by a radical change in attitudes - aided by legal changes and financial in cantives and penalties - so that jobs become de-sexed and what counts in education training and employment is the full potential of each person as a human being, Educational Bottleneck: Over the last few years we have been creating unperceived an educational bottleneck for girls. On one hand more and more of them have been encouraged to take GCE in a full range of subjects, including sciences as Table 1 shows, On the other hand there has been no corresponding effort to encourage them to use the full range of their school interests and success in further education or at work, Women university students make up 27% of the total and are mainly concentrated in arts and social science faculties, In the Further Eduaation system there are (1966 figures) about 77,000 women on full time and sandwich courses to 125,000 men; while only 97,000 girls get day release compared with 537,000 boys. Within these overall figures, there is a heavy weighting of girls in the lower level courses, and they are almost totally absent from engineering and building, and only poorly represented in science and business studies (sec Table 2). The jobs that girls and women do for the most part require little in the way of treining and education, so there mist be an incressing number, especially in the younger age range,
Table 1 (Source: Statistics of Education 1966)
1956 1966
0 A 0 A
Maths
boys S,611 13,927 103, 799 3h, 302
girls 22,808 1,86 50, 369 6,470
Physics
boys 20,076 12,677 n3,32h 24,426
girls 2,792 1,705 &,622 4,130
Chemistry
boys 17,493. 10,136 33,177. 17,166
girls 3,910 1,828 10,457 4,416
Economics | boys 2,398 HE 13,683, 13,930
girls 1,21! 351 7,67 3, 571
Social Sciences/
vocational subjects
boys 1,608 9 20, 273 4, 854 . girls 19,438 215 51,577 3, 169
who are employed below their educational a alifications as well.as below potential | ability. The proportion of women in skilled, technician, supervisory and manager- | ial. jobs is actually declining,..This shift. towards less skilled work coincided ) with a big rise in the number of women at work - from 1950 to 1967 the number of women working rose from 7.3m to 6.9m/ by 1967 LO% of women over fifteen were at work as against 36.5% in 1950...The standard official reply to those who draw attention.to the bottleneck is to point. blandly to the existence of equal opportunities in education and training. So Mr. Hattersley, Under Secretary for the DEP, Table 2 (Source: Statistics of Education 1965) Advanced courses M W Non-Advanced courses M W University first degrees OND engineering/technology 1,777 10° engineering/ technology h, 501 i seience 3,236 760 : seience 225 LS CNAA first degrees business/commerce 2,006 3,981 engineering/technology 2,93 9 ~ ONC
science 1,435 175 _._ engineerine/technology L0, 663 318 HND _.,Selance 6,06, 1,78) engineering/technology 7, 0h, 16 ' business/ commerce 11,561 1,603 science 1,063 190 _..CGLI All advanced courses _ . 6ngineering/technology 405,136 h,hhé engineering h, 52h 6" science 4,659 1,861 building 11, 7h6 35. social, administration, 6,516 3,428 metal technology 2,097 26“ business
science 17,0L0 2,682 ° wholesale & retail 3,054. 2,409
social, administration, , business studies 39,07 4,607 P
profession & vocational 8,047 2,1) © HNC
to a question from Mrs, Joyce Butler on discrimination against women in employment replied that equality of opportunity would be'better served by continuing the development of education and training facilities on an equsl basis’ (Hensard, 26 November 1968)*, As the figures quoted above indicate, the facilities are fer from being used on an equal basis, and feiling any determined attempt by the rovernment to see that they are more equally used there is the danrer thst the equal opportunities at present enjoyed by pirls in school may become vulnerable to attack especially in the present economic climate. The 'two-part career pattern' is an OK phrase too these days in the smooth speechmaker's vocabulary. They didn't invent it, however; for many years now women have worked for a few years between school and marriage, and returned to employment after raising their families, but by no stretch of imagination could it be called a career they have taken what they could get and what they could get has mostly been dogsbody jobs. If we actually provided for a two-part career pattern, with the emphasis on 'career' and 'pattern', girls would be more eager to get back to resume interesting and progressive jobs and the turnover of women employeees, which results mainly from the sheer deadliness of the jobs they do, would drop, It has often been said - especially in the early days of the Industrial Training Act - that the ITBs would be a particular boon for girls and women whose formal education had gone no further than fifteen or sixteen, Lady Williams hes made this point on more than one occasion, Less cheerful views - based on factual data have been expressed about what the Act is doing for working women, The Women's Advisory Gommittee of the TUC last year made a survery of the proportion of women employees in manufacturing industry receiving training in the years 196); and 1967 to see whether the Act has had any effect on the situation, They started with the belief that a gradual improvement was going on, but figures foreed them to conclude that such improvements as there had been were insignificant and in 'penny numbers!'. Their conclusions were echoed by the Donovan Commission (Report of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associsltions, prras 39-364) which considered the facts so disturbing and the implicstions - social end economic - so important that they had a research report prepared by Miss Nancy Sear, which confirmed their concern. The Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions own modest contribution in this field reinforces the impression of inaction - and of non-perception of any problem - on the part of most ITBs, At the beginning of last year, the Association sent an inquiry to all ITBs asking for information on these points: number of women covered by the board's operations; occupations in shich they were employed; number of women under training in industries within the board's scope; percentage of women and men emplyees under training in those industries and any changes since the board's establishment; and any special action by the board to improve training opportunities for women,.... In all industries for which figures were available on occupational distribution, women and girls were mainly in the less skilled and responsible jobs and this was as true for industries where women make up the main part of the labour force as for those whera the proportion of women employed is small. Women were also in a smaller range of jobs, typically concentrated in certain operative occupations and in clerical and office jobs; very few were in managerial, supervisory, technologist or technician jobs - both by comparison with the percentage of men in such jobs and by comparison with the total of female employees in the industry. Where data are available on the percentage of women under training the proportion in any given occupation in an industry tends to be smaller than the pro- # A Bill to make discrimination against women in employment, education and training illegal was presented by Mrs Butler on 18 Feb, and is due for a second reading.
_ be portion of males in that occupation receiving training, and the samé is true for day release, with the gap widening towards the upper age range of young workers. Only two boards of the eleven long-established ones were able to provide data on changes in the proportion of women receiving training; only slight if any rises were apparent in thse two cases, No board was taking any steps to increase the range of jobs done by women (with the exception of the Cotton ITBs courses for training instructors) or to give special encouragement to firms to train them in jobs not currently done by women. Recommendations for training and FE so far published by boards make no reference to any discrimination between men and women employees in the matter of grants or the nature of training, and boards tended to refer to this with some satisfaction in a such terms as 'schemes are designed to improve quantity end quality of training by types of empleyment and not by sex! - a fairly clear indication that they did not so far see it as any part of their function to open up wider possibilities of training and promotion for women employees, It will be interesting to see what | response the DEP and the boards make to the sugrestion - first advanced by the ATTI in a resolution to last year's women's TUC and now t-ken up by the General Council in its interim comments on the Donovan Report - that the levy/erant scheme should be deliberately used to encournge wider training and job opportunities for women, and to penalise firms which fail to give equal training opportunities to women workers. The de-sexing of jobs by a deliberate process of positive discrimin=tion in favour of women is essential = women represent the economy's last great untapped reserve, but at the moment the reserve is in danger of becomine a stagnant pond of unemployable unskilled labour. In terms of human development such a change could bring many women greater enjoyment of life and less frustration, and if men learnt to live with the implications of women having the means of financial independence by their own work, that might be no bad thing for family life either.
This article, slightly edited, is from The Technical Journal, publication
of the ATTI. April 1969 issue.
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