If this debate on married women working is to be continued then it needs to be put into perspective and we need some facts and figures. And several employers who have stated that they had few or no jobs for school leavers, because married women were remaining on in their jobs, had very little in the way of facts to back up their claim when I contacted them.
The Government Information Services, for example, had no figures on the numbers of married women working in the civil service, but a survey was being undertaken. Guinness, which was quoted in The Irish Times last week as saying that the removal of the ban on married women was partly responsible for the lack of job opportunities this year, has no definite figures either. And it transpires that the main reason for lack of recruitment is rationalisation and that it has, in fact, recruited no male labour for the past three years in efforts to rationalise.
It is only now, of course, with the great increase in unemployment, that people have begun to take notice of such developments. It normally recruits about 40 women a year and most stay on if they get married, but “not for very long really.”
C.I.E. had no overall figures either. It also has a ban on recruitment at the moment. In its Dublin area, 32 married women have remained in their jobs, which would hardly make a big dent in the unemployment situation.
Allied Irish Banks, which hit the headlines in a big way two weeks ago by announcing no recruitment this year and citing married women working as a main reason, does have some figures. Since the marriage bar was removed in June, 1973, 263 girls have married and remained on at work.
This is a sizeable number, but then they also recruited 900 people last year as opposed to their normal annual intake of 400 and this is, they say, the main reason for non-recruitment this year.
Indeed, several of the employers I talked to were quite relieved that married women were staying on. “If you have a woman in a job for which she has been properly trained and which she has been performing for a number of years, it is very inefficient if you have to turn around and train somebody else when she gets married”.
The marriage bar was dropped in the public service and most semi-State agencies in December, 1973, backdated to June 1973. Those private companies who had operated a marriage bar followed in the public service footsteps. Very little was heard of any negative effects until this Spring which would indicate that it is the growing cutback in employment generally which has focussed attention on the issue, rather than floods of married women holding down employment.
In relation to school teachers a ban on recruitment of married women in primary teaching was imposed in the early 1930s because of a shortage of jobs for male teachers but in 1957 there was an overall shortage of primary teachers and the ban was lifted by Mr. Jack Lynch, then Minister for Education.
One married woman declared: “We simply cannot accept a situation where they call us back into service when there is a shortage of teachers and suggest that we go home again when there is a surplus of applicants available. No group of workers could possibly accept such a situation”.
If we want to bring the issue even further, we could look at a report from the Economic and Social Research Institute published last year. They point out that in every single age group in the country more women than men have had the benefit of a post-primary education and say: “To the extent that a job is given to a man where a woman is better qualified, there is inefficiency in job allocation”. And again: “. . . a change in the structure of women’s employment would probably be conducive to economic efficiency”.
It could also have pointed out that girls have consistently performed a few percentages better than those boys who do participate in post-primary education. Based on this report one could quite reasonably suggest that it would be to the economic disadvantage of the country to insist that men have job priority.
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Selected by Joe Joyce; email fromthearchives@irishtimes.com
