6 ms·

Why secretary is still the top job for women

32 points by esalazar 14y ago

DerekDawn82 14y ago
I think we all know why:)
- klepra 14y ago
  why?
  - brandoncapecci 14y ago
    I think he's insinuating office romantics. Probably watching too much Mad Men.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
To me, a "secretary" is someone who would sit at a desk near an entrance, greet people, and maybe answer the phones. Maybe also have limited "PA" or "AA" jobs (calendar management, send faxes, type e-mails/letters verbatim, minimal paperwork, etc). Which still largely exists at the entrance to many companies/businesses, but doesn't really exist as often in the context of a personal or corporate secretaries. Now, the article argues that these people still exist but that the name has changed. I disagree, I think the expectations have changed. Companies expect this individual to do more than just greet people and answer calls - they have to have a brain. They have to contribute. For example an "administrative assistant" of a big executive might not only have to answer calls and greet people, but might also have to draft e-mails, speeches, and similar only to have the executive sign off on them. They might also have to work with other departments to get things done (things the executive themselves used to do). So an "administrative assistant" at least from my perspective is almost a junior executive themselves. They have the same kind of role. Now "personal assistant" is a non-executive/administrative role. But what a "PA" does varies widely from company and executive. I mean some PAs are literally doing things like collecting dry cleaning and having the executive's car services (and, yes, this IS in the job description) while others are just glorified "secretaries." I think what it really boils down to is that people, in the West, are far too expensive to just have them for the sake of it. In this day and age they're expected to contribute more for less, or they're surplus of requirements.
- thisone 14y ago
  Executive assistants and executive PAs can be highly paid and valued employees as well.
  - jriley 14y ago
    Agreed. I've also seen males hold these positions with other titles such as Chief of Staff.
- jasonkester 14y ago
  Sounds like you're thinking of "receptionist". Secrataries then did all the things you attribute to administrative assistants now. I actually had a secratary at my first job out of school, albeit a shared one between a dozen of us. It was awesome. Think of it as having "The Internet", but with a flawless voice interface, combined with a service to take away every trivial nuisance unrelated to the core of your job. You'd pick up the phone, say "I need to fly to LA on Wednesday morning, returning Friday evening", and a few hours later an envelope with airline tickets, hotel reservation and rental car details would appear on your desk. Until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought about how much I miss having that.
  - kyllo 14y ago
    Yes, having one in your workplace is quite nice. There's a good reason why secretaries/admin assistants exist, and it's this: Would you rather pay a secretary $30-50k per year to do others' administrative, clerical, and scheduling tasks, or would you rather make your executives who you're paying six to seven figures do it all themselves, cutting into their time for the much more valuable work you hired them to do? It's expensive to employ a person just for the purpose of doing clerical work for everyone else, but what's more expensive is the productivity hit you take when you force all your senior employees and officers to do it themselves. A lot of companies have forgotten this in their misguided attempts to improve the bottom line by reducing headcount.
- netcan 14y ago
  You are describing more of a receptionist/secretary type job. The secretary job that was common for a few decades and now rarely exists was essentially replaced by the PC. The required skills were things like typing, taking dictation, shorthand, filing systems. That was back when inbox was next to outbox and sat on a desk.
zavulon 14y ago
> The top job for American men, for example, is truck driver. Really? I have trouble believing that. All I could find is articles like this: http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/10/31/employers-desperate-to-fill-truck-driving-jobs/ http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/10/31/employers-desperate-...
- T-hawk 14y ago
  The article says that "top job" is sensitive to the specialization or lack thereof with the job title. Secretary and Truck Driver appear high because those titles apply across all industries. There may be more software developers than these jobs, but they're delineated into things like Financial Architect, Avionics Developer, Educational Software Engineer, Medical Analyst and so on. There's also seniority modifiers for these jobs, but nobody talks about a Principal Secretary or Resident Truck Intern, so the base forms appear more populous.
rikacomet 14y ago
4 million is the figure for the top job? America has 300 million people when I last checked, third highest in the world. Its about capacity also, and not always women being disallowed opportunity. If you ask yourself, why at least 40% of world CEO/CFO/Presidents are not women, its not always due to women being denied fair opportunity, but also, because there is not enough candidates that eventually are able to go that high. Also, it is also the choice. Such articles are something I very much disagree with because they present things as: "because women are not CEO's in majority of corporations of the world, it must be because they are being denied fair opportunity". which is not always true, because it is also about choice. A lot of people, with capacity to do much more, still decide to do something, under their capacity, because of one universal truth called Love.
- brandoncapecci 14y ago
  I feel similar. The reality of this example is that sexism tends to work in favor of prospective female secretaries, not against them. Attractive women would hold an edge over more qualified men simply by way of how superficial the position still is.
andrewdubinsky 14y ago
Much of this article describes the central element of the pay discrepancy between men and women. Men are more willing to work in unpleasant jobs (e.g. truck driver, garbage collection). These jobs pay well because they are unpleasant. Men are more willing to work in remote environments. (e.g. Alaska, North Dakota). Everyone wants to live it NYC or West Hollywood. It's great lifestyle. No one wants to live in Odessa, Texas. Men are more willing to accept dangerous work where the chance of workplace injury is high (e.g. construction, mining, fishing, manufacturing). These locations and the jobs they provide suck. They are long hours with high risk of injury, often outdoors, or away from family in places no one willingly chooses to live. Often these jobs include persistent exposure to harmful chemicals. For identical jobs, men and women still have a pay discrepancy and that should be addressed. However, simply saying that women are paid less on average fails to capture the whole story. In defense of men, most of the jobs lost in the recent recession were jobs held by men.
- meej 14y ago
  Two of the top five jobs for women are nursing and nurse's aid, which are jobs that also involve unpleasantness, high risk of workplace injury, and long hours.
  - pc86 14y ago
    Compared to secretarial work? Absolutely. Compared to working on an oil rig in the gulf? Come on.
    - andyzweb 14y ago
      nursing in a hospital is quite dangerous
    - tomjen3 14y ago
      I don't know how dangerous it is to work on an oil rig, but I imagine it is pretty dangerous to work in a mental facility too.
  - beaumartinez 14y ago
alex_c 14y ago
So, why is secretary still the top job for women?
- sarah2079 14y ago
  Yeah, I was disappointed that they mentioned the 96% female figure and then didn't discuss it at all. It was more an article about why there are still so many secretaries, not why they are still mostly women.
- _mulder_ 14y ago
  Agreed. I didn't see a single answer to this question in that article.
dmor 14y ago
It bugs me that they lump executive assistants in here. From my experience they are so far from secretaries (I know several who are making 6-figures in this job too), from what I've seen most EAs are usually more like an apprentice who wants to get into a competitive field and needs to shadow someone with a very specific skillset and responsibility to get there. That's why assisting magazine editors, fashion designers, finance executives, even tech executives is so promising for women (and men) right out of college. I once heard someone say that they thought most of the early EAs from Amazon.com would probably go on to be CEOs in their own right.
- thisone 14y ago
  Aye, an executive assistant is someone with a significant ability in logistics and possibly accounting, as well as someone who understands what each part of the company does and who understand the industry to the point where they are able to keep things moving along while the big bosses concentrate on their jobs. An EA also has to have very good people skills, including that hard one of "how to say no and make people want to listen to you" Someone who can do all that isn't a dime a dozen.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Sounds more like a Chief of Staff you are talking about.
    - thisone 14y ago
      I'd never heard the title "Chief of Staff" until today, tbh. It does make sense as most titles with "assistant" in them tend to sound diminutive.
- Evbn 14y ago
  President Obama has a Cabinet full of Secretaries. The problem is that receptionists and transcriptionists are called secretaries.
adekok 14y ago
This article repeats the statistic that "Across all industries and occupations, full-time female workers earned 78 cents to every dollar a man earned in 2010." That's phrased misleadingly. The truth is the median wage for full-time female workers is 78 cents of the median wage for full-time male workers. The difference in phrasing is important. Statistics are hard. The explanation is given in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow When you compare workers with equal experience, equal education, and equal training, the pay gap pretty much disappears. This claim can be correlated with laws against gender discrimination. It's illegal to pay women less than men for the same work. If the "78 cents" statistic was true as phrased above, most women would have grounds to sue for gender discrimination. Since those lawsuits aren't wide-spread, the discrimination isn't wide-spread either.
PeterisP 14y ago
Is it? During my work life, I've noticed the virtual elimination of secretaries/exec assistants as a job position. 20 years ago, most bigcorps had a secretary for every Boss-type, and a secretary or two as 'greeters'/office managers in every large office site. When I left a local bank (~500 employees) a year ago, they had only 1 'secretary' at all - a single executive assistant that covered the 7 board executives there. Everything else was covered by automation, DIY electronic calendars, outsourcing of things like plane reservations, etc.

32 points by esalazar 14y ago

DerekDawn82 14y ago

I think we all know why:)

klepra 14y ago
why?
- brandoncapecci 14y ago
  I think he's insinuating office romantics. Probably watching too much Mad Men.

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

To me, a "secretary" is someone who would sit at a desk near an entrance, greet people, and maybe answer the phones. Maybe also have limited "PA" or "AA" jobs (calendar management, send faxes, type e-mails/letters verbatim, minimal paperwork, etc). Which still largely exists at the entrance to many companies/businesses, but doesn't really exist as often in the context of a personal or corporate secretaries. Now, the article argues that these people still exist but that the name has changed. I disagree, I think the expectations have changed. Companies expect this individual to do more than just greet people and answer calls - they have to have a brain. They have to contribute. For example an "administrative assistant" of a big executive might not only have to answer calls and greet people, but might also have to draft e-mails, speeches, and similar only to have the executive sign off on them. They might also have to work with other departments to get things done (things the executive themselves used to do). So an "administrative assistant" at least from my perspective is almost a junior executive themselves. They have the same kind of role. Now "personal assistant" is a non-executive/administrative role. But what a "PA" does varies widely from company and executive. I mean some PAs are literally doing things like collecting dry cleaning and having the executive's car services (and, yes, this IS in the job description) while others are just glorified "secretaries." I think what it really boils down to is that people, in the West, are far too expensive to just have them for the sake of it. In this day and age they're expected to contribute more for less, or they're surplus of requirements.

thisone 14y ago
Executive assistants and executive PAs can be highly paid and valued employees as well.
- jriley 14y ago
  Agreed. I've also seen males hold these positions with other titles such as Chief of Staff.
jasonkester 14y ago
Sounds like you're thinking of "receptionist". Secrataries then did all the things you attribute to administrative assistants now. I actually had a secratary at my first job out of school, albeit a shared one between a dozen of us. It was awesome. Think of it as having "The Internet", but with a flawless voice interface, combined with a service to take away every trivial nuisance unrelated to the core of your job. You'd pick up the phone, say "I need to fly to LA on Wednesday morning, returning Friday evening", and a few hours later an envelope with airline tickets, hotel reservation and rental car details would appear on your desk. Until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought about how much I miss having that.
- kyllo 14y ago
  Yes, having one in your workplace is quite nice. There's a good reason why secretaries/admin assistants exist, and it's this: Would you rather pay a secretary $30-50k per year to do others' administrative, clerical, and scheduling tasks, or would you rather make your executives who you're paying six to seven figures do it all themselves, cutting into their time for the much more valuable work you hired them to do? It's expensive to employ a person just for the purpose of doing clerical work for everyone else, but what's more expensive is the productivity hit you take when you force all your senior employees and officers to do it themselves. A lot of companies have forgotten this in their misguided attempts to improve the bottom line by reducing headcount.
netcan 14y ago
You are describing more of a receptionist/secretary type job. The secretary job that was common for a few decades and now rarely exists was essentially replaced by the PC. The required skills were things like typing, taking dictation, shorthand, filing systems. That was back when inbox was next to outbox and sat on a desk.

zavulon 14y ago

> The top job for American men, for example, is truck driver. Really? I have trouble believing that. All I could find is articles like this: http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/10/31/employers-desperate-to-fill-truck-driving-jobs/ http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/10/31/employers-desperate-...

T-hawk 14y ago
The article says that "top job" is sensitive to the specialization or lack thereof with the job title. Secretary and Truck Driver appear high because those titles apply across all industries. There may be more software developers than these jobs, but they're delineated into things like Financial Architect, Avionics Developer, Educational Software Engineer, Medical Analyst and so on. There's also seniority modifiers for these jobs, but nobody talks about a Principal Secretary or Resident Truck Intern, so the base forms appear more populous.

rikacomet 14y ago

4 million is the figure for the top job? America has 300 million people when I last checked, third highest in the world. Its about capacity also, and not always women being disallowed opportunity. If you ask yourself, why at least 40% of world CEO/CFO/Presidents are not women, its not always due to women being denied fair opportunity, but also, because there is not enough candidates that eventually are able to go that high. Also, it is also the choice. Such articles are something I very much disagree with because they present things as: "because women are not CEO's in majority of corporations of the world, it must be because they are being denied fair opportunity". which is not always true, because it is also about choice. A lot of people, with capacity to do much more, still decide to do something, under their capacity, because of one universal truth called Love.

brandoncapecci 14y ago
I feel similar. The reality of this example is that sexism tends to work in favor of prospective female secretaries, not against them. Attractive women would hold an edge over more qualified men simply by way of how superficial the position still is.

andrewdubinsky 14y ago

Much of this article describes the central element of the pay discrepancy between men and women. Men are more willing to work in unpleasant jobs (e.g. truck driver, garbage collection). These jobs pay well because they are unpleasant. Men are more willing to work in remote environments. (e.g. Alaska, North Dakota). Everyone wants to live it NYC or West Hollywood. It's great lifestyle. No one wants to live in Odessa, Texas. Men are more willing to accept dangerous work where the chance of workplace injury is high (e.g. construction, mining, fishing, manufacturing). These locations and the jobs they provide suck. They are long hours with high risk of injury, often outdoors, or away from family in places no one willingly chooses to live. Often these jobs include persistent exposure to harmful chemicals. For identical jobs, men and women still have a pay discrepancy and that should be addressed. However, simply saying that women are paid less on average fails to capture the whole story. In defense of men, most of the jobs lost in the recent recession were jobs held by men.

meej 14y ago
Two of the top five jobs for women are nursing and nurse's aid, which are jobs that also involve unpleasantness, high risk of workplace injury, and long hours.
- pc86 14y ago
  Compared to secretarial work? Absolutely. Compared to working on an oil rig in the gulf? Come on.
  - andyzweb 14y ago
    nursing in a hospital is quite dangerous
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    I don't know how dangerous it is to work on an oil rig, but I imagine it is pretty dangerous to work in a mental facility too.
- beaumartinez 14y ago

alex_c 14y ago

So, why is secretary still the top job for women?

sarah2079 14y ago
Yeah, I was disappointed that they mentioned the 96% female figure and then didn't discuss it at all. It was more an article about why there are still so many secretaries, not why they are still mostly women.
_mulder_ 14y ago
Agreed. I didn't see a single answer to this question in that article.

dmor 14y ago

It bugs me that they lump executive assistants in here. From my experience they are so far from secretaries (I know several who are making 6-figures in this job too), from what I've seen most EAs are usually more like an apprentice who wants to get into a competitive field and needs to shadow someone with a very specific skillset and responsibility to get there. That's why assisting magazine editors, fashion designers, finance executives, even tech executives is so promising for women (and men) right out of college. I once heard someone say that they thought most of the early EAs from Amazon.com would probably go on to be CEOs in their own right.

thisone 14y ago
Aye, an executive assistant is someone with a significant ability in logistics and possibly accounting, as well as someone who understands what each part of the company does and who understand the industry to the point where they are able to keep things moving along while the big bosses concentrate on their jobs. An EA also has to have very good people skills, including that hard one of "how to say no and make people want to listen to you" Someone who can do all that isn't a dime a dozen.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Sounds more like a Chief of Staff you are talking about.
  - thisone 14y ago
    I'd never heard the title "Chief of Staff" until today, tbh. It does make sense as most titles with "assistant" in them tend to sound diminutive.
Evbn 14y ago
President Obama has a Cabinet full of Secretaries. The problem is that receptionists and transcriptionists are called secretaries.

adekok 14y ago

This article repeats the statistic that "Across all industries and occupations, full-time female workers earned 78 cents to every dollar a man earned in 2010." That's phrased misleadingly. The truth is the median wage for full-time female workers is 78 cents of the median wage for full-time male workers. The difference in phrasing is important. Statistics are hard. The explanation is given in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow When you compare workers with equal experience, equal education, and equal training, the pay gap pretty much disappears. This claim can be correlated with laws against gender discrimination. It's illegal to pay women less than men for the same work. If the "78 cents" statistic was true as phrased above, most women would have grounds to sue for gender discrimination. Since those lawsuits aren't wide-spread, the discrimination isn't wide-spread either.

PeterisP 14y ago

Is it? During my work life, I've noticed the virtual elimination of secretaries/exec assistants as a job position. 20 years ago, most bigcorps had a secretary for every Boss-type, and a secretary or two as 'greeters'/office managers in every large office site. When I left a local bank (~500 employees) a year ago, they had only 1 'secretary' at all - a single executive assistant that covered the 7 board executives there. Everything else was covered by automation, DIY electronic calendars, outsourcing of things like plane reservations, etc.