Eleven Tips on Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employees:

There's no longer any question whether transit companies should hire women for jobs formerly held by men. The draft and manpower shortage has settled that point. The important things now are to select the most efficient women available and how to use them to the best advantage. Here are eleven
helpful tips on the subject from Western Properties:

1. Pick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they're less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or they wouldn't be doing it, they still have the pep and interest to work hard and to deal with the public efficiently.

2. When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home at some time in their lives. Older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves and are inclined
to be cantankerous and fussy. It's always well to impress upon older women the importance of friendliness and courtesy.

3. General experience indicates that "husky" girls - those who are just a little on the heavy side - are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.

4. Retain a physician to give each woman you hire a special physical examination - one covering female conditions. This step not only protects the property against the possibilities of lawsuit, but reveals whether the employee-to-be has any female weaknesses which would make her mentally
or physically unfit for the job.

5. Stress at the outset the importance of time; the fact that a minute or two lost here and there makes serious inroads on schedules. Until this point is gotten across, service is likely to be slowed up.

6. Give the female employee a definite day-long schedule of duties so that they'll keep busy without bothering the management for instructions every few minutes. Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack initiative
in finding work themselves.

7. Whenever possible, let the inside employee change from one job to another at some time during the day. Women are inclined to be less nervous and happier with change.

8. Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.

9. Be tactful when issuing instructions or in making criticisms. Women are often sensitive; they can't shrug off harsh words the way men do. Never ridicule a woman - it breaks her spirit and cuts off her efficiency.

10. Be reasonably considerate about using strong language around women. Even though a girl's husband or father may swear vociferously, she'll grow to dislike a place of business where she hears too much of this.

11. Get enough size variety in operator's uniforms so that each girl can have a proper fit. This point can't be stressed too much in keeping women happy.

I started working for a living in 1968, and had a number of part-time jobs from 1960 on, so I remember pretty frank and open expressions of some of these attitudes. As Doug says, they haven't necessarily gone away, just underground, if that. Gee, we're still a problem, ain't we, girls.

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3. General experience indicates that "husky" girls - those who are just a little on the heavy side - are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.

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Yes! Vindicated! (Hire me, hire me!)

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*chuckle*. Some of it is oddly patronizing, but other parts have some serious common sense - see for example the "adequate number of breaks" thing.

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Geez, I'd hate to be a guy at this particular place of business. Apparently, people swear at you and riducule you all day, you never have any breaks, you're stuck doing the same task all day, nobody gives you clear guidelines on how to do your job, and you have to squeeze into uniforms that don't fit properly.

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Well done -- reading it as you would a photographic negative.

Come to think of it, I've had one or two jobs like that.

Come to think of it II, haven't we all?

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...the gist of some of the advice seems to be that women are still -- gosh! -- unused to behaving as alienated economic units, and may have to be brought along slowly ...

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This could describe most peoples' response to industrial work since about 1800. It's certainly the basis of Taylorism, and its contemporary mutations.

Now I account only to myself. The budgets are still someone's fantasy-underestimate; I am thus often working for nothing; but at least I don't fill out time-sheets.

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Aaaarrgh! I lived by time-sheets for a brief time some years ago. In my kind of work, they produce an impossible double-bind: if you're honest about the time you spent on a project, you're over the budget the managers fantasized to get their projects approved by the accountants in the first place; but if you try to protect the project by protecting the budget -- which you can only do by leaving lots of blank spots on your time-sheets -- you're vulnerable for not accounting closely enough for your hours.

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Seriously. See my comments over on the "do you work for free? thread.

In my kind of work you'd have to substitute "clients" for "accountants," but it's otherwise the same.

Not only that, but I think 50 years from now, women will look back on the feminists of today, who are concerned with race and class and orientation discrimination (not to mention leftovers of the sexism we've been fighting since the first wave at the turn of the last century) and be grateful to us for continuing the effort despite some privileged women who benefit from the fruit of feminism but then stab feminists in the back verbally by saying, "Oh, I don't like feminists, they're too RADICAL."

FYI I remember finding a copy of a 1951 Vancouver Province, and leafing through the want ads. Employment ads were divided into "Help Wanted - Men" and "Help Wanted - Women". Naturally, only menial positions were listed in the latter.

And, for those with strong stomachs only, there's this site that details a horror story that could give anything that Hollywood produces a run for its money...and it's real, not fiction. A story on what often happened to women who refused to accept their lot in those times - confinement to a mental institution, and subjection to barbaric "treatments" that attempted to force them back into line.

RD