ABSTRACT
In the early 1940s, large portions of the world were at war. Women rapidly joined the workforce in large and unprecedented numbers, which required different approaches to management that took into account the role of gender, experience, and social expectations. In this chapter, I analyze “Supervising Women Workers,” an eleven-minute instructional film created during World War II to train front-line managers to address the shift in the composition of the workforce. The chapter focuses on a description of the instructional and film content and its relevance to social norms, human performance challenges, and assumptions of gendered capabilities and norms. The role of the film style, production design, and design concerns related to the film are considered.
