Battle to get to the top

Press, 31 October 1977, Page 16

Battle to get to the top

NZPA staff correspondent London Women at the top — Britain’s female executives — say it is a battle to get there and even in senior positions they are paid less than their male counterparts and are forced to do menial tasks. In a survey of 316 top woman managers, Alfred Marks, the country’s largest employment bureau, found that more than half felt they had less prospect of promotion simpiy because of their sex. Only one British executive in 50 is a woman. “A large number thought they were unfairly paid but the worst cut was the way they were constantly being mistaken for secretaries” Mr Bernard Marks, chairman of the agency said. Although more than half of the executive wives earned as much as or more than their husbands only seven per cent were paid $lB,OOO to $23,000 and nearly 24 per cent said they did not receive the same perks as their male colleagues, the survey said. The need to “prove myself” was mentioned frequently by the women, of whom 38 per cent said the competition with men for jobs had made them abnormally tough.

Many of the women interviewed said they believed few women had the ability or desire to hold senior posts, with a third saying they thought women were far more emotional than men. Although the majority of the woman executives admitted using their feminine wiles to get ahead, most said that business and pleasure did not mix. “Sex must be kept out of the office,” one woman said. And another said successful women had to be “like Caesar’s wife — above reproach.” Meanwhile men are profiting from women’s lib at an engineering firm in Britain. Under the Equal Pay Act, designed to bring women’s salary up to par with men’s, an industrial tribunal has awarded men a pay rise of about $6.20. Men and women at the firm were getting the same pay for the same job — but the women worked only 37.5 hours a week while the men worked 40. A spokesman for the Equal Opportunities Commission, set up to ensure that the sex-discrimination acts were properly administered, said: “We welcome any type of equality — that is what the commission is all about.”-