Where Have All the Secretaries
Gone?
“He
may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they’re looking for
something between a mother and a waitress,” says office manager Joan Holloway
to new recruit Peggy Olson in Season One of Mad Men. The show, which
returns to AMC for its sixth season on April 7, revels in the ghosts of offices
past: drinking on the job, racist jokes, typewriters. Mad Men’s advertising agency is built
around a charmingly retro (if gallingly sexist) division of labor. Secretaries
screen calls, arrange meetings, manage calendars—and often make great
wives—allowing their bosses to create life-changing ad campaigns and go out for
boozy client lunches. Those were the days.
Fifty
years later, as a result of changing technology and cost-cutting, assistants
are disappearing from corporate life, along with their cousins, executive
assistants, office managers, and clerks. “There’s absolutely no question that
fewer people have secretaries now,” says Pat Cook, a corporate recruiter who
places executives at blue chip companies. “People at the C level, the chief
marketing level, and so on, probably still do have an assistant. But when you
get below that level, it’s free fall.” This does reduce head count, but, she
adds, “everybody agrees that they could be so much more productive if they had
an assistant.”
A 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review, “The Case
for Executive Assistants,” points out that surfing Expedia
to book business trips and itemizing expense reports is hardly an
efficient use of a senior executive’s time. For someone earning close to $1
million a year, an $80,000-a-year assistant needs to help the boss become only
8 percent more productive for the company to break even. “When workers see the boss loading paper into the copy
machine, the theory goes, a “we’re all in this together” spirit is created,”
writes the article’s author, Melba Duncan. “But as a management practice, the
structure rarely makes economic sense. Generally speaking, work should be
delegated to the lowest-cost employee who can do it well.”
Ted
Childs Jr., a former top executive in IBM’s human
resources department, describes the awkward transition that followed when he
lost his assistant and began to share an admin with his entire team. “My
assistant used to screen my e-mail—I probably got 200 or 300 messages a day.
Without that, I had to read them all myself and sort out the garbage from the
important people,” he says. “I had to set aside time in the evenings to do it,
because I had meetings during the day.”
Childs’s
situation is now the norm. In Women Laid Off, Workers Sped
Up, a paper for the Roosevelt Institute, authors Bryce Covert and
Mike Konczal note that women lost 925,000 jobs in “office and administrative
support” occupations between 2009 and 2011. And they point out that the
continuing “speedup” within the economy has workers taking on ever-increasing
burdens, often without extra compensation. In a 2011 survey, 52 percent of
assistants said they supported three or more people, and they reported a median
salary of $45,000. “This trend has been going on over the last 20 or so years,”
says Childs. “There’s been a steady change in culture and management practice
and a need to reduce costs,” he says. “A gatekeeper is nice. I don’t know if a
gatekeeper is affordable.”
In industries where assistant
jobs often had functioned as apprenticeships, younger workers have seen
entryways into careers shut down. Rachel Hooper, now an analytic consultant at
Truven Health Analytics, started out as a secretary for the Tennessee
Department of Health. “I used my downtime there to learn about databases, and
when one of my colleagues left for another company, she knew my skills and
essentially took me with her,” Hooper says. “My secretary job allowed me to
network and learn new skills for climbing the ladder.”
The
assistant-free mentality is especially prevalent in Silicon Valley, where part
of the high-tech CEO machismo entails bragging about “flat” organizations and
self-reliance. However, a recent blog post by Chad Dickerson, the CEO of online
retailer Etsy, suggests a backlash against the assistant-purge in corporate
America may be imminent.