
Why secretary is still the top job for women - esalazar
http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/31/news/economy/secretary-women-jobs/
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andrewdubinsky
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.

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meej
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
Compared to secretarial work? Absolutely.

Compared to working on an oil rig in the gulf? Come on.

~~~
tomjen3
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.

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UnoriginalGuy
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.

~~~
jasonkester
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
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.

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dmor
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
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
Sounds more like a Chief of Staff you are talking about.

~~~
thisone
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.

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zavulon
> 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-...](http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/10/31/employers-desperate-to-
fill-truck-driving-jobs/)

~~~
T-hawk
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.

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PeterisP
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.

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adekok
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>

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.

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

~~~
sarah2079
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.

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DerekDawn82
I think we all know why:)

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klepra
why?

~~~
brandoncapecci
I think he's insinuating office romantics. Probably watching too much Mad Men.

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rikacomet
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
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.

