Lyn Owen: `Equal at Work?'
Task 1: Introduction
Write down 2 jobs which:
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Task 2: Reading
A
Put the missing lines into the text:
this social transformation would ever be achieved. Hedged about by our own self-images, as much as by the opposition of
years the impossible has happened. There are women piloting British airliners, women as navigating and radio officers on
In the early seventies when the Department of Employment and EEC alike said the answer to women's low pay - and perhaps to poverty in general - was for women to break through the ring-fence of special women's employment, it seemed improbable
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employers, unions and husbands, it looked as if it would be impossible for us to grasp that the roles of Pamela the Great Man's Handmaiden and Dora the tea-lady were roles, imposed from outside, and not the limits of our capacities. Events since have demonstrated the untruth of these impressions. Women of all types have blazed trails in new areas, so that in a matter of a few
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ships, women detective superintendents leading murder enquiries, women military officers performing strenuous training exercises - all on equal terms.
B
Fill the gaps with the following words:
pressure abandoned boundaries presser
The change has not been one of revolutionary speed but it has spread through a wide range of jobs. It's not longer university graduates and the like who are breaking the ____________ of tradition. The late seventies was the time when June Wilson, a cleaning lady, Alison Crompton, a night-club hostess and Rosalba Turi a clothing factory ___________, left their traditional jobs and became crane drivers. It was the time when Colette Clark and Margaret Chairman resisted all their school ____________for them to become shopgirls, clerks and seamstresses, to take up electrical trades apprenticeships. When Maureen Marshall gave up assembly work for skilled joinery. When Cristina Stuart who ________________ her secretarial work to travel the roads of Europe as a rep, became Sales Manager of her Publishing House.
C
Read the text and answer the questions below:
Even without high-flying ambitions , work of a more masculine cast has strong advantages. At Maureen Marshall's factory in Doncaster, work had been traditionally segregated - even though, ironically, all the work involved was of `masculine' character in a joinery factory making doors, window-frames and even housefronts. The bulk of the labour, however, was female and it was the women who supplied the joinery work which was frequently very heavy. Meanwhile the men minded cutting machines and drove fork-lift trucks at higher rates of pay. The men were allowed day-release to become skilled apprentices; the women remained, in paper terms, uneducated even after 28 years in the same factory, and even when they were privately skilled in advanced cabinet making. The men as qualified machinists had the option of moving elsewhere if better jobs presented themselves. And they progressed up the firm to become foremen and managers. The women technically unqualified, were considered good only for the exact job they were in, however skilled they might individually be. When equal pay legislation came into force, the work done by the women, which in the pre-war times was done by the qualified joiners, was downgraded by the employers to unskilled , and continued at unequal rate to the men's. Maureen whose foreman had encouraged her to move into the male area, was one of the few who got equal pay, and had a foot on the ladder towards supervisory work, or work options elsewhere.
What was ironic about the work distribution in the Doncaster factory?
Why was equal pay legislation ineffective?
Explain in your own words what Maureen gained apart from equal pay?
D
Some lines contain mistakes. Find them:
Another one problem for women, according to an industrial psychologist , is that ` they constantly __________________ undervalue themself, taking a humble viewpoint. Cristina Stuart, in the fact, has learned the male____________________ technique of making her own chances. `There really are things you have to grown out of once you're mov- _______________ ing, that sort of feeling that you have, at first, of just being greatful for having a place on the bench alongside _____________
the big boys, that initial wondering when you are talking through directors and managers in other companies of ___________
whether it will come over as you intention, or whether they'll take what you say as a female chatter. You have to ___________ train yourself out of this female lack of assertiveness. At least, I don't think it is specifically female - you see ______________ it in men too - they have to make a effort when they move into management from another job, to get. ___________
the style. Though I think it is the harder for women because it goes against a lifetime training. And you've also got to ________ counter that female tendency to be overhelpful, insufficiently competitive and wary.
E
Put the lines into the right order:
_____ But for true equality, why can there not be a further stage - unmentioned as yet - valuing women's jobs properly. Why
_____ up one morning and you are a manager in the whole way you react and act and think, and it is second nature. There
1____ `And it is possible. Bit by bit, when you find things work, that you are effective, that you are indubitably really there as far
_____ all boils down to a matter of attitude.' It is evident that women can, and are, adapting themselves to male professions.
_____ should not a nurse or a home help be considered valuable and paid as well as a carpenter or plumber? When this
_____as work results are concerned, any feeling that you are wearing a disguise gradually melts away. Suddenly you wake
_____ are awful lot of girls in jobs below their capacities simply because of the way they think about themselves. In the end, it _____ equation is solved, equality will be here.
Task 3: Follow-up
Scan the text and find all jobs mentioned there:
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