BEHIND THE GRILLE

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2709, 2 March 1916, Page 3

BEHIND THE GRILLE

WOMEN IN BANKS. - |'j (By an Ex-Woman Manager in the £ "l'all Mall Gazette.") | The appearanco of women on tho $ inner side of the grille in hanks is not wholly an innovation, although their | introduction there 011 so extensive a | scalo as is even now the case is actu- | ally novel. The opening of Farrow's » Bank for Women, in 1910—the stalf of r which was composed solely of women, jg with the exception 'of one boy attendant | —was the pioneer work of that especial. \ nature in the British Islos. 5 The writer can speak witli some authority about the subject of that particular institution, having undertaken the post of manager in the early stages j of its career, when prejudice had to be J broken dowu. The must valuable ob- , jeetions to its institution would, I \ think, have been ovorrrubd had the j reivsure itself been less daring and the j way to the opening-out of new areas \ of work for women—an object near to j the heart of its founder, Mr. Farrow — • been paved by degrees instead of all ; at once. Had, say, oven one or two ; v.-omen been employed in every branch ; and trained as lads are trained in most ! important banks, grade by grade in ■ a system of progression, working up from the comparatively easy stages of remittance and waste work to the writing up of passbooks, the posting of ledgers, and so oil, to cashier's work behind the counter, there would by now—five years later—liavo been a far greater brigade r.-f competent workers to draw upon in the national crisis. . My own experience is that women ■ work better in responsible positions ; when they are working alongside men j who take the situation seriously lhan ■ ' when' they arc suddenly plunged into | a rather dramatic. position, full in the | public eye, without being possessed of imagination enough to realise the full potentiality of the post. The class which I personally found most satisfactory in recruiting clerks 'was the ledger-keeping class in substantial shopping firms. One big establishmen); provided mo with one assistant j who almost automatically fell into-'tier | right place in the bank; an admirable ; arithmetician, she had had the advan- ' » tagc of excellent training, and was ac- j customed to office routine and hard j work. The young daughters of cus- j tomers, whose claims wero 'always J strongly urged upon mo, and are be- ; ing urged upon the staff department of J many banks, now that the necessity of employing women is known to bo im- K minent, are less satisfactory, to deal - with. The position of women in banks at , tho present moment is as follows: —They J are working (strictly under men's super- E vision) at the easier classes of business jj as a rule. On the wholo they are ef- C ficient. A member of the staff of ono | of the most important banks has told { me that they are, in fact, doing actu- | ally better than men over military age 8 drawn from the Stock Exchange, who \ have of late been taken on as clerks. They are move painstaking and less casual about time; they keep to tho prescribed limits of the luncheon hour, and so forth. To take.&ll example, one woman is at work 011 share 1 transfer business, and dealing with the certificates alone in that department exactly as lier predecessor did. Tho business naturally is. lessened at tho present time, owiii£ . to the war, but she is conducting it single-handed. 'She had had tho advantage of a' lone course of business training in a well-known firm of the kind previously mentioned. ' But as yet, according to my informant,, the actual speed attained by woman as a rule is not equal to man's speed. "Generally speaking, it takes three woraon to do the work of two men."