Minority Report
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Minority Report TECHNOLOGY AND WOMEN'S WORK By Elizabeth Faulkner Baker Columbia. 460 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Professor of Economics, Barnard College In the American labor...
...As Caplow and McGee note in their cynically realistic The Academic Marketplace, discrimination against women occurs "not because they have low prestige, but because they are outside the prestige system entirely...
...Nowhere is the disparity more marked than in the professions...
...Although in the 19th century special protective legislation was their only solace, in the 20th century women enjoy the benefits of labor legislation applicable to both sexes, the protections of labor unions as strong as the ILGWU, and the promise of equity embodied in the Equal Pay Act of 1963...
...their status thus depends inevitably upon the community's attitudes toward minorities...
...On occasion technology has done damage...
...Universities are even more unfair in their treatment of women scholars...
...In escaping the drudgery of farm and domestic labor, women have not yet achieved the same economic position as men in the preferred occupations...
...In the author's words, "sixty years ago 58 in every 100 women were doing either farm-work or domestic service...
...On balance women have improved their position...
...Professor Baker neither ignores these continuing evidences of male prejudice against female rivals nor forgives the men who benefit economically from the exclusion of women...
...Women doctors and still more women dentists are a small minority...
...They have been paid substandard wages, excluded by employers or male unionists from skilled jobs, enlisted on occasion as strikebreakers, and subjected to the customary prejudicial doubts about their capacity to work as effectively as their male competitors...
...Although women constitute a large majority of elementary school teachers, and a smaller majority of secondary school instructors, they represent a pitifully small fraction of college faculties...
...It appears from her account that in good measure women have shared the fortunes of other minorities...
...Long summer breaks, sabbatical years, and flexible hours make it quite possible for the academic women to produce publications and progeny more or less simultaneously...
...Still, like the other minorities, women have been making progress...
...In the 19th century the typewriter, at the century's turn the Northrup loom, and more recently a clutch of office machines have opened large numbers of jobs to women...
...all the same, that in manufacturing women fill an inordinate proportion of low-paid jobs and that in the white-collar occupations so popular with women unions are either weak or nonexistent...
...Nevertheless, her impressively reasoned and organized analysis of current tendencies in American education and society leads her to a cheerful conclusion: "Indeed, may we not look forward to the time when the fact is generally recognized that in most respects women have far more in common with men than society has yet been willing to accept, that men and women are more alike than different, that they are complementary rather than opposite...
...It is no accident that the sentence ends with a period rather than a question mark...
...Indeed the academy, esteemed by its more fatuous members as the temple of liberal sentiment, has a fair claim to maximum prejudice against professionally qualified women...
...At august Harvard six women are permanent members of the faculty...
...The record is mixed...
...Like Negroes, who rank second, they cannot readily pass as members of the majority group...
...Yet of all professional careers an academic vocation interferes least with marriage and the family...
...Technology has often aided women in their struggle for fair treatment...
...And just as a few anthropologists have argued that Negroes are racially inferior, some psychologists and psychoanalysts, among them Carl Jung, have insisted that women are fit only to be wives and mothers...
...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Professor of Economics, Barnard College In the American labor force women are our largest minority...
...Baker's interesting, scholarly volume is an historical in vestigation of just how this particular minority has fared from colonial times to the present...
...Yet here are specialties where the more adept fingers of women and the feminine gift of empathy (both in other situations somewhat condescendingly conceded by men) are not allowed as adequate grounds for equal treatment by medical schools and professional societies...
...It remains true...
...Automatic dialing systems have eliminated female operators, computers have opened jobs to female programmers and eliminated the jobs of female clerks, and merchandising technology has reduced the number of counter employes...
...Today the ratio is less than 13 in 100...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 1
