WOMEN'S -JOBS- WONDER : SPECIAL HISTORY ESSAY

WHEN WOMEN gain jobs - it's not entirely a triumph. The new roles they take on are often no longer wanted by men, researchers find. Secretaries were once almost all men. The job went to women when it lost upward mobility.

With the rise of the modern corporation around the turn of the 20th century, however, the secretary became more like a noncommissioned officer - a worker with real responsibility but little upward mobility.

It was at this point that the position became mostly female. Companies then broke up and degraded the job further over the decades, replacing the secretary with pools of typists, receptionists and data entry personnel, almost all of them women, too.

The final step, amid pressure from the feminist movement in the 1970s, was to allow a small number of college-educated women to ascend from these clerical jobs to the ranks of middle management.

But even this came with a loss of status, as managers would have to do more of their own grunt work. '' They're now being promoted, but the clerical tasks are promoted with them,'' said Jason Resnikoff, a labor historian.

'' The middle manager would do more typing, correspondence, more of their own filing.''  These days, almost no one has an assistant.

The workplace of the 1970s seemed to produce one feminist victory after another. At the end of the decade, just over 40 percent of women worked. By 1980, over half did. 

Newspapers and magazines heralded the development : A front page story in The New York Times announced, '' More Women Work at Traditional Male Jobs.''

But when the sociologists Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos looked carefully in their 1980 book, '' Job Queues - Gender Queues, '' they became more pessimistic.

The percentage of women in jobs as varied as bus drivers, baker, typesetter, book editor, real estate agent and public relations specialist had risen sharply. In each instance, however, employers had changed the work in a way that made it less attractive.

They leveraged pay or made it more volatile -say, by shifting from salaries to commissions.  They reduced job security, professional autonomy or opportunities for advancement.

They created inferior versions of the traditional male jobs and sought women to fill them. '' Women's numerical gains in feminizing occupations mask their ghettoization in lower paying, less prestigious occupational subspecialities, the sociologists wrote." 

This Master Essay Publishing continues in many future parts. !WOW! thanks Noam Scheiber.