Extracted text

OCR Page 1 of 34
January 27, 1956 (I-103) NATIONAL MANPOWER COUNCIL Information Memorandum No. 103 3 and REPORT ON WOMANPOWER CONFERENCE New York, N. Y., January 16-17, 1956 Summary a. This memorandum reports on a conference held in New York City to review with outstanding women leaders the proposed scope of the Council's study on womanpower and the Council's present tentative position with respect to the areas of policy recommendation. b. The participants thought that the Council should be aware that the term "womanpower, if 1t is used for the title of the report, will be viewed by some as too broad and by others as too narrow. Neverthe- less, there does not appear to be another term better suited to convey the focus of the Council's study. c. The discussion emphasized two major problem areas in womanpower=- the career woman on the one hand, and the intermittent woman worker on the other. With respect to the first, i.e., the women who enter employment with an adequate educational background and training, and who remain as full-tim workers making a major investment in their jobs, industry still fails to utilize them effectively. It fails to identify these women or to offer them opportunities for training and advancement to high level administrative and policy-making posts. d. With respect to those women who do not remain as full-time workers in the labor force, the problems are in many ways more complex. The declining age of marriage which interrupts the education and training process; the early withdrawal from the labor force for home-making and family responsibilities; the scarcity of part-time employment opportunities which might enable those women who had acquired skills to continue to use them; the de-valuing of volunteer experience which might serve a. similar function; the inadequacy of training and guidance facilities for older women who wish to enter or re-enter the labor force; all these are aspects of the current problem which need fresh consideration with a view to making concrete and realistic recommendations. e. In searching for a basis for re-evaluating these problems, the conference stressed the following: Quite apart from what a high quality education might contribute toward the more effective utiliza- tion of women as workers at any stage of their lives, this education is needed if women are to survive as individuals in this scientific age. In the process of improving their education for living, a aubstantial contribution is likely to be made toward increasing their employability. Educational guidance for girls needs to place in- creased emphasis on the multiple roles which, the probabilities indicate, they will be called upon to play in the coming years. Industry, on the other hand, needs to place increased emphasis on the individual workers and to abandon some of its easy but false generali- zations about women workers.

Relations