Caution: Women at Work

Norwegian merchant ships have long carried women radio operators, but last week a radically different distaff arrangement was added to the fleet. For the first time, two girls shipped out not in the radio shack but as deck hands or, so to speak, as ordinary seawomen. Other women have been qualified in France and Britain to fly commercial airplanes, and SAS may soon hire its first woman pilot. As women become more emancipated and labor shortages give them a suitable entree, females around the world are turning up in every kind of job from aircraft mechanic to road-construction crew women.

The list of jobs that women are doing is almost endless. In Canada, lumberjacks have been joined by lumber-Jills. In the U.S. this summer, the Good Humor man may as often as not be a Good Humor woman. In Europe, women have turned into bricklayers, painters, welders, cabinetmakers, watch repairmen, goldsmiths, pharmacists, chimney sweeps and even traveling saleswomen. No less than 85% of Finland's dentists are female, and so are a quarter of the physicians. In both Japan and France, there are women firemen. Norway, like the U.S. and other countries, has hired femailmen to carry letters, and around the world the gentler sex is tending bar, driving forklift trucks, giving golf lessons, servicing automobiles and running heavy machinery in factories.

Blue & White. The feminine invasion is most noticeable in blue-collar jobs. Falling birth rates after World War II in many countries created a shortage of the manpower necessary to keep up with the demands of rising economies. Womanpower was a logical solution. Moreover, tests have shown that in such areas as manual dexterity, eye-hand coordination and depth perception, women generally excel men.

White-collar women are moving ahead at a slower pace. In the U.S., where 41% of all women work, the proportion of working women classified as professional and technical has dropped from 45% in 1940 to 37% today because G.I. Bill-educated ex-servicemen have moved into these fields in larger numbers. Women as a percentage of the total work force, in the same period, increased from 26% to 36% as more blue-collar women moved into the jobs such men might have held. Determined women are still finding new opportunities. Since women buy 45% of the liquor purchased in the U.S., Schenley Industries Inc. last fall hired blonde Marsha Lane, 39, for the newly created executive position of "women's marketing consultant." Other women are making their marks in other fields. Among them:

sbINVESTMENTS: Julia Montgomery Walsh, 45, of Washington, D.C., spends part of her day as a senior partner at the investment firm of Ferris & Co., spends the rest in "yours, mine and ours" domesticity with four sons from her first marriage, seven more children who arrived with her second husband, Real Estate Broker Thomas B. Walsh, and a three-year-old son since born to them. Her salary is $200,000 a year.

sbSTOCK TRADING: Mary Whelton, who says she is fortyish, handles from $2,000,000 to $10 million worth of stocks every day as one of three traders at Boston's Massachusetts Investors Trust, one of the nation's largest mutual funds. "You can't lose your cool when you're handling the kind of stocks MIT does," says an admiring male associate, "and Mary Whelton is calm, cool, collected--and very, very smart."

sbMARKETING: Lia de Keyzer, 30, was recently named press officer at Unilever's Rotterdam headquarters, succeeding a male who was retiring. Unilever, a pioneer in putting women into the executive suite, also has a feminine managing director of its British research bureau. Other European companies are slowly doing the same thing. Imperial Chemical Industries recently began interviewing and recruiting women students as it has long done with men.

sbTECHNOLOGY: Catherine Selleck, 34, of Los Angeles, is manager of IBM's Western Region Systems and Installation Center, heads a staff of 17 men and two women who provide technical assistance for IBM computer-service men. Because of severe shortages of programmers and systems analysts, women have at last moved strongly into the computer field. Barbara Johnson, 41, when nine-year-old son Eric asks her about space, can give a better answer than most mothers: as supervisor of the entry and trajectory group of North American Rockwell's Apollo project, Mrs. Johnson is an aerodynamics engineer in charge of 18 other engineers, all men.

Along with the Pill. The reasons behind such wide-ranging feminine activities stretch from the legal to the physiological. In the U.S., for instance, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate between the sexes in matters of employment. Other nations have passed similar laws or eased tax regulations that formerly penalized the working woman. Moreover, the laws of nature have also been amended with the increasing use of contraceptives. Says Joan Keenan, superintendent of agencies in the field-office department of John Hancock, and supervisor of 1,800 people in 300 offices: "The pill has worked wonders with the termination rate. The girls do not leave seven months after they get married, as they used to." Thus employers who formerly considered women poor long-term risks are now willing to hire them. Once on the job, however, women still find outright or subtle discrimination. The biggest discrepancy is pay; almost nowhere are women paid at the same rate as men, even when they perform the same tasks. Women executives, moreover, are barred from many luncheon clubs and kept off executive airplane flights. Their irritation at such slights is not all pride, since many a business conference is carried on across the lunch table or aboard an airplane. Muriel Siebert, 38, holds a $445,000 seat on the New York Stock Exchange, the first woman to buy one, but does not take advantage of her privilege to trade on the floor of the exchange. One reason is that the floor, with its 1,366 men, has no rest-room facilities for women.

Men, moreover, frequently do not believe that women can do a job. Vancouver Insurance Agent Ruth Carothers found, when she was an adjuster, that male customers could not believe that she knew enough about automobiles to do her job. "I would tell them I was the adjuster and they'd ask again for the real adjuster. They just couldn't believe it." Many men, and most women, also do not like the idea of reporting to a female boss. Says John Hancock's Joan Keenan: "It's difficult for a man to accept the idea of reporting to a woman at work. He does that at home, and that's enough."

Limited Mobility. Another general problem is the fact that married women have limited mobility and are less able than men to transfer to different jobs in other cities, as big corporations would like them to do.

In spite of such drawbacks, more and more women are going to work. Money is the main motive, but a job also fulfills emotional needs and helps women get rid of their tensions. The result, observers generally agree, is a happier home life--as long as the wife does not make more money than her husband. Says Mrs. Nilza de Vasconcellos, 48, sales manager for a textile factory in Rio de Janeiro: "A woman with a career can talk with her husband, instead of just listening to him. A dialogue is always better than a monologue, and an excellent introduction to love."

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