Jobs: A Good Man Is Hard to Find–So They Hire Women

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

—So They Hire Women

When the Fuller Brush Man rings once, look twice—he may well be a woman. After relying almost entirely on men for 60 years, Connecticut’s Fuller Brush Co.—taking a tip from Avon Products—has hired 17,500 women this year, plans eventually to field 50,000, mostly part time. Throughout the country employers are turning more and more to women to fill jobs that they have never held before, or at least not since the World War II heyday of Rosie the Riveter.

In the past several months, women have gone to work producing steel and rebuilding auto parts in Chicago, loading post-office vans and delivering the mail in Atlanta, welding and operating metal-stamping machines in Fort Worth, driving cabs in Seattle, running power cranes in Los Angeles, and pumping gas at service stations along the Illinois Toll Road. Elsewhere, women have been engaged as draftsmen, meatcutters, warehouse laborers, helicopter pilots and company guards.

The reason for this upswing in female employment is the shortage of skilled and semiskilled labor, which has become so acute that Federal Manpower Expert Howard Stambler says: “There are almost no men left.” Unemployment is down to 3.8%—mostly unskilled—and job openings for trained people are increasing. The number of adult women at work rose in the past year by 2.3 million to 25.5 million, most of whom are married. Today, one out of every three married women has a job outside the home, and almost one in three adult U.S. workers is a woman.

Effects of the Pill. In greatest demand are women office workers. For the first time, women have been hired as clerks on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. John Fanning of Manhattan’s Fanning Personnel Agency says that the shortage of secretaries “is the tightest we’ve ever seen”; a competent young secretary in New York can get $110 a week. Like many training and placement agencies, the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School offers refresher courses for older graduates who have been busy raising children, but now want to get back to work.

Mature women with older children are rapidly returning to the office. Since 1955, the number of working women aged 35 to 64 has risen from 11.4 million to 15 million. Employers often prefer middle-aged women because they are less likely than younger married women to be kept away by a child with the mumps or some other domestic crisis. At the same time, much of the old prejudice against hiring younger women—for fear that they will marry, become pregnant and quit—has eased with the rise in use of the birth-control pill. “We never would have done this before the pill,” says a Midwestern publisher who now hires mostly women.

Sexual Discrimination. Women still tend to get the lower-paying, less interesting jobs. Their representation in management remains negligible, and such professions as law and medicine are still difficult to crack. Less than 1 % of working women earn $10,000 or more, their median income is $3,145—not much above the Government’s official poverty line—compared with $5,308 for men. But with the help of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on sex as well as race, many women are being treated almost as equals. Boston Local 34 of the Bartenders and Dining Room Employees Union has finally admitted women, with the result that they now can serve as waitresses in places previously closed to them.

For many years ahead, women will constitute the fastest-rising supply of new workers. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that in the decade ending in 1975, the total of working women will increase by 25%, while the gain for men will be 17%. No wonder that when the venerable church bell rings out every evening at Ipswich, Mass., the bell ringer is a woman—for the first time in 333 years.