EQUAL AT WORK?
1) What are the advantages of equality at work?
2) What factors make equality at work hard to achieve?
In the early seventies, when the Department of Employment and EEC alike said the answer to women's low pay and perhaps to poverty in general was for women to break through the ring – fence of special women's employment, it seemed improbable this social transformation would ever be achieved.
Hedged about by our own self-images, as much as by the opposition of employers, unions and husbands, it looked as if it would be impossible for us to grasp that the roles of Pamela the Great Man's Handmaiden and Dora the tea-lady were roles, imposed from outside, and not the limits of our capacities.
Events since have demonstrated the untruth of these impressions. Women of all types have blazed trails in new areas, so that in a matter of a few years the impossible has happened. There are women piloting British airliners, women as navigating and radio officers on ships, women detective superintendents
leading murder enquiries, women military officers performing strenuous training exercises -all on equal terms.
The change has not been one of revolutionary speed but it has spread through a wide range of jobs. It is no longer only university graduates and the like who are breaking the boundaries of tradition. The late seventies was the time when June Wilson, a cleaning lady, Alison Crompton, a night club hostess, and Rosalba Turi, a clothing factory presser left their traditional jobs and became crane drivers. It was the time when Colette Clark and Margaret Chairman resisted all their schools' pressure for them to become shop girls, clerks and seamstresses, to take up electrical trades apprenticeships. When Maureen Marshall gave up assembly work for skilled joinery. WhenCristinaStuart, who abandoned her secretarial work to travel the roads of Europe as a rep, became Sales Manager of her Publishing House.
Even without high-flying ambitions, work of a more masculine cast has strong advantages. At Maureen Marshall's factory in Doncaster, work had been traditionally segregated - even though, ironically, all the work involved was of a 'masculine' character in a joinery factory making doors, window-frames and even house fronts. The bulk of the labour, however, was female and it was the women who supplied the joinery work which was frequently very heavy. Meanwhile the men minded cutting machines and drove fork-lift trucks at higher rates of pay.
The men were allowed day-release to become skilled apprentices; the women remained, in paper terms, uneducated even after years in the same factory, and even when they were privately skilled in advanced cabinet-making. The men, as qualified machinists, had the option of moving elsewhere if better jobs presented themselves. And they progressed up the firm to become foremen and managers. The women, technically unqualified, were considered good only for the exact job they were in, however skilled they might individually be. When equal pay legislation came into force, the work done by the women, which in the pre-war past had been done by recognized qualified joiners, was downgraded by the employers to unskilled, and continued at an unequal rate to the men's. Maureen, whose foreman had encouraged her to move into the male area, was one of the few who got equal pay, and has a foot on the ladder towards supervisory work, or work options elsewhere.
Another problem for women, according to an industrial psychologist, is that they consistently undervalue themselves, taking a humble viewpoint. Cristina Stuart, in fact, has learned the male technique of making her own chances. 'There really are things you have to grow out of once you're moving, that sort of feeling you have at first of just being grateful for having a place on the bench alongside the big boys, that initial wondering when you're talking to directors and managers in other companies of whetherit will come over as what you intend, or whether they'll take what you say as female chatter. You have to train yourself out of that female lack of assertiveness. At least, I don't think it is specifically female-you see it in men too-they have to make an effort when they move into management from another job, to get the style-though I think it's harder for women because it goes against a lifetime's training. And you've also got to counter that female tendency to be overhelpful, insufficiently competitive and wary.
And it is possible. Bit by bit, when you...
angielski_89