GIRLS PREFERRED

Evening Post, Volume LXXXV, Issue 138, 12 June 1913, Page 3

GIRLS PREFERRED

FOR OFFICE WORK DISADVANTAGES OF BOYS. (bt tilegbaph— special to thi post.) CHRISTCHURCH, This Day. When at a recent meeting of a suburban local body a resolution was moved to the effect that a typiste should be engaged to assist the clerk at a salary of 15s a week, an interesting discussion was provoked. One member baaed his objection to the proposal on a ponderous social question. "A woman's place is in the home," he said. "'A typiste will learn nothing in our office to fit her for the domestic duties of wifehood and motherhood. Let ua get a boy for the position. We will be training him for a career; he will grow with the office, and will be ready for a higher position as the increase of work provides it." "I would not have a boy in my office," said a member of the body. "A boy will stay for a few weeks, and will then leave for a position with a larger salary. We will merely be making our office a place in which boys may serve their apprenticeship to clerical work. For 15s a week we can get a girl who will be of use to us. We cannot get a boy worth having for such a sum. A reporter who made enquiries of a few employers of boy and girl clerical labour, found that the***ame opinion was expressed by many of those interested. "There is a continual procession, of girls passing from school through commercial colleges into the offices of the city." said the manager of a large drapery firm. " Without them Ido not know what the employers would do for clerical labour. They are neat, careful, and intelligent, and are well trained in the work they are required to do. They can earn their wages right from the start, but when I take a boy into my office I have as a rule to teach him for a month or so before he is of much use to me. I have to induce him to write legibly, to avoid the more disfiguring kinds of blots and erasures, and to refrain from wool-gathering and performing auch consequent feats as adding three-fifths of a penny to the Merivale five-eighths, as one boy attempted to do! Here is my office staff," he added, throwing open a door behind which many white blouses and bobbing hair ribbons bent over clicking typewriters and ponderous ledgers. There were three men in the midst of a small army of girls, and no boys at all. But do you not find that there are many classes of work in which you can employ boys but not girls? asked the reporter. "Practically none," said the manager. " Girls go to the post and collect debts and sign cheques and do all kinds of things for which it is the popular delusion that masculine firmness is necessary. As a matter of fact, girls pp to the age of twenty or twenty-one carry far more weight and appear much more responsible beings than boys of the same age. They grow up earlier."