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The role played by women in the economy is strange, to say the least. Women do better than men at all levels of the educational system, from primary school to university, and the government wants Britain to be at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy in which brains rather than brawn are the secret of success.
So it should be simple. Put the people with the smarts in charge and we would all be better off. Yet the latest evidence suggests that the thicker of the two genders remains firmly in control. Women may be making their presence felt in some of the professions - medicine and the law, for example - but men are still firmly in control of high finance, big business and the economics profession. A quarter of the companies in the FTSE 100 don't have a single woman director and only one in eight of the directors appointed last year was female.
Nor is it only in the old economy sectors that men rule the roost. Research sponsored by the DTI and published last week showed that the number of women employed in IT had continued to decline and now stands at just 16%. Even more worryingly, many of the women in IT are employed in the lower skilled and lower paid areas.
The explanation for the under-representation of women at senior levels in the economy - from policymaking to the boardroom - is not entirely clear. It could be argued that men are only in control temporarily. Women have only recently started to play a role in economic life but will play an increasingly important role as the nature of the economy changes. This is a neat theory but ignores the fact - highlighted by two papers to this month's Economic History Society - that women have influenced the commercial life of Britain for centuries. A paper by Clare Rose of the University of Brighton showed that working women in the 1890s had many problems that are familiar today: securing equal pay for equal work; the glass ceiling; and "how to find affordable clothes that presented a professional image".
As seen in Trollope
The last 20 years of the 19th century saw a big expansion of women employed in offices. As the novels of Trollope highlight, in the middle of the century clerks were usually men. This changed with the introduction of the typewriter after 1880: there were 12,000 women office workers in England but by 1911 the figure had risen to 173,000. Fear of "immorality" meant that women had separate entrances and worked in different offices. Conveniently, this prevented them from comparing their pay and work with that of men: a male clerk would expect to take home £150 a year, a female clerk £30-40 a year for doing the same job.
Even so, the women faced distrust and hostility from male supervisors and colleagues. Rose notes, however, that up until this time women had tended to be factory hands, shop assistants and servants, but that their arrival in white collar jobs opened up new business opportunities. Women, she says, needed to dress in a way that showed they were prepared to work; respectable, but still feminine. The fact that they were all young and unmarried added to the stress on their appearance.
The problem of what to wear in the office was solved by the development of business suits for women. These were made in factories in Manchester and London, advertised in national press campaigns, and sold by mail order. A large number of the designs for business clothes were by women. Ellen Ashwell designed more than 600 for the same manufacturer, and Annette Claxton worked for different manufacturers and also for herself. These women and others were clearly working as commercial artists, although their contribution has not been recognised.
Judith Spicksley of Cambridge University showed that women in the late 16th century may have helped provide the seedcorn capital that prompted the transition to an industrial society. Well captured by the film Shakespeare in Love, this was a time when England was witnessing the rise of a new capitalist class that was starting to challenge the landed gentry for economic and political supremacy. In the film, a daughter of a nouveau riche merchant falls for the Bard but is betrothed by her father to an impecunious aristocrat in need of ready cash to invest in a Virginian plantation. After a brief fling, Viola de Lesseps does her duty; her father ploughs a good part of his fortune into the New World in exchange for status.
It's a rollicking good tale, but Ms Spicksley's research suggests that young unmarried women were indeed canvassed by those looking to raise funds for entrepreneurial forays on the other side of the Atlantic. There were still laws against the practice of usury, but these did not apply to young single women who were not seen as making a living out of the activity of lending. Indeed, lending for interest was one way for young spinsters to increase the size of their fortune, hence increasing their attractiveness as brides. Ms Spicksley's delving into consistory court records reveals the growing importance of lending by young single women. At a time when there was a limited amount of cash in circulation, she argues, the release of this capital was important for the business community. "Unlike young single men, whose capital was more likely to be tied up in property or trade, the cash held by single women was available for use." But it was not just that the volume of available funds for investment increased; women also tended to lend on far more benign terms. They set interest rates below the prevailing quasi-maximum under the usury laws, made no additional charges for late payments and were prepared to excuse interest payments in a variety of circumstances.
Aggression
Beliefs about status and position in early modern society combined with the way individuals experienced the benefits of their lending to ensure that such lending was not merely accepted but encouraged. Today it would be seen as investment rather than lending.
So if women were there at the birth of industrialisation, why are more of them not making it to the top? I'm not sure what the explanation is, although the evidence is that men will not be prepared to give up their seats on the board without a fight. One woman in a high-flying job told me last week that she thought it had something to do with aggression; you could teach intelligent women to be assertive, but with men it came naturally.
This may be true, but it's not exactly comforting. A survey released last week by the Hay Group found that men were far more ambitious than women and more likely to be highly motivated at work. "The workplace is no longer the preserve of men, but the legacy of the male-dominated workforce may be affecting women's prospects", said Emmanuel Gobillot of the Hay Group. "Our research suggests that the job roles we create, values we prize and training we provide still fail to motivate women to the same degree as men."
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