SUITED FOR OFFICE WORK.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 116, 18 May 1932, Page 9

SUITED FOR OFFICE WORK.

it A TEMPORARY JOB."

BOY WANTS LIFE CAREER

"There ie a lot to be said for Mr. Cuthbertson's point of view," said the head of a very large Queen Street establishment this morning, "but I think lie liae failed to trace the girls and boys through their careers. As a matter ot fact, there is a lot of 'office work that is much better performed by girls than boys, but an even stronger argument against replacing the girls in offices by boys is that there are so few jobs m offices that lead to anything that could be. called a 'career. . There are scores of positions in offices where the girls will rise to a certain emolument, say, up to £2 10/ a week; but they have no prospect' of getting beyond' that} etage. With a girl this limitation of the job is not a drawback, as most of them look forward, after spending a certain number of yeare in business, to marryin" and making a home. With a boy the case is entirely different. It is worse than useless; training him for a job that must of necessity be extremely limited in its prospects. When a boy goes to work, he wants a job that will give him a life career, a job in which he can earn enough to keep himeelf and his dependents. A girl seldom, if ever, goes into a job with the fixed'intention of making it her life's work; to her it ie generally eomething that she .expects 'to last only a certain number of years.

"In office work there is not enough scope for a large number of boys. At most, there may be in an office half a dozen positions that would carry the emolument sufficient to keep a man and his family. The majority of the workis of a routine and detailed nature that exactly suits girls —what one might call the 'floating population , of business. Typewriting, the working of adding machines, the dissection of dockets, and so on, are all jobs that are quite suitable for girls; in fact, we find that girls are much more careful in such jobs than boys, but those positions in an office would hardly be ,a suitable career for a man. People who advocate replacing the girls in offices with boys forget that while the boy invariably grows up to be a man in business the girl seldom or never grows old in it. In a word, a girl generally goes into an office for temporary employment, while a boy goes into it for a career."