WOMEN:
Condensed from an article entitlurl "Equity" contributed by members of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) Women's Caucus for Training and Development Journal, Vol.28, No.12
There exists a womb-connected stereotype that women as a class have to cope with in the world of work. In separating social issues from work issues, it is necessary to learn about dif ferent conditions which exist at different times and how they impact on today's decisions through folk images. What does a supervisor "see" when he or she looks at a woman worker -the womb-enclosing uniform or the human being available to do tasks, work on tearn assignments regardless of the accident of biology?
Average life expectancy about 2000 years ago was 30 years. That means that adult life today is about two times longer than in 1900 and about four times longer than 2000 years ago.
A work career is now thought to be about 20 to 25 years equal to or longer than the adult period of 2000 years ago. When one's total adult life expectancy is 15 to 20 years, one has only one career goal and a few choices. When adult life expectancy doubles or triples, more choices must be made by everyone. That means a possibility of three careers of 15 to 20 years each.
NEW LIVES NEW CHOICES
At this stage in our cultural history, the law tells us that most adult individuals can conscious. ly make occupational choices and can try to im. plement those choices. Forty-seven per cent of the present U.S. population (men) is required to make occupational choices. However, application of the principle of having to make several occupa tional choices is not fully available for 53 per cent of our total population (women) because of the accident of biological functions and the his tory of how those functions control the ability to make occupational choices.
A critical question in the world of work is, "Do we include in the group or class of 'childbearing persons' only those who actually bear or bore children, or also those who possess the overt characteristics (i.e. the assumption of potential) of child-bearing?”
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The class, "women, 20 to 40 years of age," has historically been assigned the child bearing. rearing career. The bearing-rearing functions are written together because they have been simplistically thought to be directly connected. Today, they are not directly connected nor should they be except by choice.
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In Roman times, child bearing rearing was a single function. There was barely enough adult life for women to produce a sufficient number of children to merely maintain the race. The sexes were in different occupational roles directly related to sexual class.
Today, especially in the U.S., many women in the 20 to 40 age group are not in the childbearing-rearing group. Many spend 10 or more of those 20 to 25 bearing-rearing years in fulltime employment (just like most of their nonchild-bearing sisters and all the men). Almost no women over 40 bear children and women's adult life expectancy is three times that of child-bearing-rearing expectancy.
The group, "non-child bearing-rearing adult" is no longer 95 to 99 per cent male. The accident of sex no longer automatically assigns the larger per cent of women to a choiceless occupational role. The group, "non-child bearing rearing adult" does not have the same people
now as it did 2000 years ago. The graph shows the two.conditions.
Some rough guesses are that about 40 per cent of adult women today spend (on the average) 10 full time years child-bearing-rearing. We know 15 per cent cannot have children and 55 per cent are too young or too old.
As the graph shows, 2000 years ago, 50 per cent of the population spent nearly 100 per cent of its total adult life span in child-bearing-rearing. Today, perhaps 40 per cent of the total popula tion spends 9 per cent of its adult life span bearing-rearing children.
The critical thing happening in our present work world, is that the required, single occupational grouping of adult women of 2000 years ago is still made for adult women today. However, the majority of occupational needs of wo men today more nearly resemble the occupational needs of men of 2000 years ago than of women from then. When the men and women who are not directly connected to the child-bearing rearing function are put in one group, only about five per cent of our total adult time is spent in the child-bearing-rearing function. That is far from the 50 per cent of the total adult population involved with child-connected functions of 2000 years ago. continued on page 9
ESTIMATED LIFE EXPECTANCIES
2000 YEARS AGO
50%
100%
life expectancy
BOYS
MEN
GIRLS
age
0
15
WOMEN
30
life expectancy
50%
100%
MEN
pandans
30
1968
BOYS GIRLS
age
15
45
72
Estimated time spent in women's child bearing-rearing activities Women's estimated adult life span
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