So, as the world continues to change, the role of women in the workplace is continuing to evolve.
James Fallows, one of my current favorite writers, has an encouraging piece up on the Atlantic site: Mr. China Comes to America. It is about how new technology is enabling the process from idea to production to go much more quickly, and how that might really help manufacturing jobs come back to America. He references the new Chris Anderson book, Makers:
A revolution is coming to the creation of things, comparable to the Internet’s effect on the creation and dissemination of ideas,” Linus Chung told me at Lime Lab, in San Francisco. (Chris Anderson, formerly of Wired, has recently advanced a similar case in his book Makers.)
So, read this article to better understand the changes in manufacturing. He ends the article on this encouraging note:
But developments like these are an important part of the solution. Any account of a region’s growth or decline at any stage of our economic history has indicated promise when the region is full of people optimistically starting small ventures, and decline when it is not. “The real key to long-term value creation is that ongoing string of new companies,” Liam Casey told me this year, in New York, after he had met with people considering start-ups there. “That’s where you create the next wave of value, and new jobs.” American culture has long been favorable to the start-up, and the United States has captured a disproportionate share of the profits from their innovations. Shifts in technology may soon allow us to capture more of the jobs.
But… it is a little but not-so-little insight, almost mentioned in passing, that caught my attention. I’ve bolded the important portion of the quote below.
I noted a parallel change at some PCH factories. On my previous visit, four years earlier, virtually all of the assembly-line workers had been female. This time, all but one of the PCH factories I visited was staffed predominantly by young men. I asked the supervisor of the one all-female line why there were no men on it. “These are the more responsible jobs,” she said. (The women were handling online orders from American customers for a famous electronics brand.) She was partly joking, but many factory managers say openly that they prefer women for any job not requiring unusual strength. The prevailing view is that women learn new jobs faster, handle high-precision work better, and pose fewer disciplinary challenges. (I am just telling you what they say.) But as the modernizing Chinese economy creates more options for women, fewer of them are choosing factory work. That leaves men.
Here’s what I think. The “easy to do, but demanding physical work” can be done by men just fine. But for attention to detail, “high-precision” work, women seem to be better at taking care of the {little} details of getting it right. From personal experience, I can assure you that when it comes to careful attention to detail in any job at our house, it is no contest. My wife is the one who can provide such skill — I can’t.
One of these days, I think we are going to finally realize that for a lot of what needs to be done successfully, the skills and propensities that women bring to the workplace might be just what is needed. We are beginning to see this in a number of revealing work-place trends.
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