ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses why women moved into office work, who the women moving into offices were, what their experience was, and how they and the men around them appear to have felt about the change. The feminisation of office work was the result of the combined agency of a number of historical actors. Departmentalisation, like stratification, played an important role in the feminisation of office work. Departmentalisation in large offices, used division of labour to create jobs that consisted of isolated routine tasks. Though departmentalisation based on division of labour, or stratification based on responsibility, may help explain the feminisation of clerical work in large multi-departmental enterprises, these sorts of enterprises were not the work environment of the majority of office workers. Modern historians often see the main reason for the feminisation of office work to be the fact that women received lower pay for equal work.
