Just fifteen seconds in, they mention women exclusively; what’s up with that ?
$$. Women were cheaper to hire than men.
Because the teenage boys originally recruited for this function proved too unreliable (pranks and unprofessional behavior and such).
Presumably the original trend of hiring teenage boys was derived from the contemporary institution of the “telegraph boy”: a teenage uniformed messenger of the telegraph company who delivered telegrams, ran errands and so on. But their phone manner was apparently less than stellar:
Wrong, AFAICT: they probably weren’t any cheaper than the teenage boys they replaced. See above.
Yes, my understanding is that they weren’t very polite with the callers, and argued with them a lot–bad customer service.
Part of the reason to hire young boys or women is the same reasons why, when my father had to hire all the workers for an electronics factory in the 1960s, the people in Production ended up being overwhelmingly female. Those jobs did not require physical strength or large size (so being a grown man wasn’t beneficial), and like being a phone operator they did require speed manipulating small objects in a very precise fashion (as Dad put it: “the women came from cooking and needlework; the men came from hoeing”).
If you don’t hire teenagers, you have to hire either women or men. Women were cheaper than men, partly (if not mostly) because men had many more employment opportunities than women did.
It was also seen as a “women’s job”, like secretary, typist and nurse. In the UK, it was the two world wars that changed attitudes to women in the workplace, but there was still a general idea that some jobs were more suitable for women, and consequential men did not want to do them. This was partly the lower wage, but also social pressures.
There were certainly exceptions where women were acknowledged to have some advantage over men in the same job. Back in the 60s I used to deliver to steel works in Sheffield, then a major ‘steel town’. Naturally, the workforce was overwhelmingly male, except for the crane operators. They sat alone in tiny cabins up near the roof, operating 100 tonne cranes manoeuvring massive plates or baulks of steel with precision. Apparently they were a lot better at it than men.
It’s probably not like this now since so much is automated, but when I first started working the IC industry in the 70s, the operators in the fabs (factories) were almost all women. The engineers were men, and the operators were women.
But if you think about the telephone industry, the “teenage boy” model was probably not sustainable even if they behaved. This was a time when mandatory schooling was becoming the norm, and so there just aren’t that many teenage boys available. Meanwhile, the telephone industry is growing like gangbusters. Child labor laws, too, would have played a role. Teenage boys might have seemed like the perfect solution a operators at the very beginning when there were few phone around, but that would have played itself out pretty quickly.
Yes, I remember seeing a show on TV about the semiconductor industry in the 1980s, which showed a fab in an East Asian country. The workers had to do a task that involved looking through a microscope and making fine adjustments to something. They were all women, and the show said the opinion was that only women were able to do the job well.
There definitely have been a range of jobs in which women were seen as superior to men, and those opinions were probably to a large extent correct.
So one interpretation is that women were actually better at doing the job of phone operator, on average, than men. We can speculate as to why that is so, but one reason may be that the higher-pitched female voice carried better over the phone lines and was more audible. Even today, a female voice is often used in similar functions: e.g., Apple’s Siri, voicemail menus, etc. Indeed, the female voice seems to be overwhelmingly preferred.
Curiously exactly the opposite reason was used to argue that women made terrible radio announcers. Of course that was a high profile highly paid job.
Curiously these did not become seen as “women jobs” until mid to late Victorian era, when at the same time women became less prevalent in factories.
What were their customers going to do? Switch to the other phone company? Anybody have any insight into why customer service was seen to have vital importance to a monopoly in the 1880s whereas most modern companies, even those with plenty of competitors, don’t seem to care about customer service at all anymore? Is it just a cultural shift, or something more?
This explains how the profession was perpetuated as mostly female; but it doesn’t really explain how it was established as such. When the first phone operators were being hired, were there certain characteristics of the work that made it seem “female”? Or was there some other factor (like the wage issue mentioned above) that led to women being hired, with the later perception that it was “women’s work” being based mainly on the fact that women had been hired in the early days?
Men would have been attracted to the higher paying jobs that required 1) muscle and 2) had an element of danger. Such jobs were considered unsuitable for women. Can you think of an unskilled “Factory-type” job where lots of people were needed, that was NOT dangerous and did NOT require muscle power that men dominated instead of women?
Because they wore that mouthpiece thing around their neck, and couldn’t talk into it unless they had tits to hold it up.
Also, women had higher-pitched voices, which could be more easily heard and understood on the poor quality of transmission lines in the earlly days of telephony. Women announcers were often preferred in the old short-wave days of propaganda radio, which were often jammed.
SNIP
This explains quite a bit.
Emma Nutt was the first woman telephone operator ,
Actually, this is true. For decades, the standard for telephone voice reception was 300-3000 hz. Baritone and bass voices typically have fundamentals <400 hz, while sopranos fundamental tones are >250 hz. Ergo, female voices fell more into the sound range that telephones could reproduce well.
By contrast, even in the early days of AM radio, stations could broadcast a frequency range of about 40-5,000 hz reasonably faithfully. The problem was (and still is) atmospheric and electrical interference. One of the most elementary ways of dealing with static and whine is to filter out high frequencies. Also, speakers weren’t very good at reproducing higher frequencies. That favored announcers with deeper voices.