It seems impossible to tell as yet how the working of the National Insurance Act will affect women clerks.  The secretary of the Information Bureau of the Woman’s Institute says that, as far as she knows, good offices continue to pay their clerks their salaries in cases of illness, only making a deduction of the 7s. 6d. paid as insurance money.

To sum up, there is urgent need for better organisation among clerks and secretaries.  They should be graded in some way, so that the efficient who are out of work may easily be brought in touch with employers.  The societies reach only a small proportion of the workers, many of whom do not even know of their existence.  It must be remembered that a difficulty in the way of men and women clerks combining, is that women of good education, sometimes in possession of degrees, find themselves in competition with men of an inferior social class.  A large proportion of the best secretaries are the daughters of professional men.  The average woman clerk is invariably a person of better education and manners than the male clerk at the same salary.

In the next place, better sanitation and better working conditions must be secured.  Only last year, a firm employing hundreds of men and a dozen women, had no separate lavatory for the women.  It is to the interest of the employer of women clerks to look after their health and to provide rest rooms.  Anti-feminists are positive as to women’s “inferior physique,” but their practice as employers is too often inconsistent with their opinions.

Most important of all, women clerks and secretaries want more scope.  After ten years of clerking and secretarying they find that they are up against a dead wall.  There is no prospect of advancement, and no call on their initiative.  In private secretarial work this is not always the fault of the employer; it is often inherent in the nature of the work.  Unless the secretary has, say, literary or journalistic ability and develops in that way, she is worth little more to her chief, if he is a literary man, after fifteen years than she was at the end of ten.  There may be progress from a less desirable to a more desirable post, but there can be no advancement in the work itself.  As a training, however, a private post is incomparable.  With the woman who works for a commercial firm, it is a different matter.  Women of the best type who do this work, have a right to complain when they are without chance of promotion.  They feel that they should be given the same opportunity of rising in the business, whatever it may be, as is open to any intelligent office boy.  The reply of the employer is, that while the office boy, if promoted and given increasing pay, may be expected to stay with the firm for a lifetime, there is not the same certainty of continuity of service from women clerks, who may at any time leave to get married.  There are cases, however, where women have stayed on after marriage when it has been made worth their while.  One woman who entered a firm as a young girl, continued with the firm after marriage, and is now, as a widow, working for the same employers.  There is no reason why such cases should be exceptional.