The Players and the Stage

Men and Women of the Corporation: The Population

For just experience tells, in every soil

That those that think must govern those that toil.

—Oliver Goldsmith, “The Traveller”

“Women are temperamentally unfit for management.”

—Respondent to a Harvard Business Review survey

“Woman’s place [has been] at the typewriter.”

—Margery Davies, Radical America

Every day a large proportion of all Americans don their figurative white
collars and go to work in offices, where they take their stations in the
administrative machines that run large organizations.
Large organizations not only dominate economic and political life (one
common prediction holds that 200 multinational corporations will run the
world’s economy by the year 2000); they also control most of the jobs. The
possibilities people experience in work, then, are often limited by the job
structure made available by the design of large organizations. Nearly 20
percent of the total nonagricultural employed labor force works for local,
state, or federal government.1 Another 30 percent are employed by
business enterprises with more than 500 people on the payroll.2 And that
half of the labor force does not include a variety of other large
organizations that cannot be called “businesses” but are often run like
them: private universities, private hospitals. Over 12 million Americans
work in firms that employ over 10,000 people. In manufacturing, the
dominance of large organizations in providing jobs is even more striking.
As Table 1—1 shows, 60 percent of all persons employed in
manufacturing in 1967 were in firms with at least 1,000 people, 42 percent
in companies with over 10,000 employees. At the same time, the labor
force is concentrated in white-collar jobs, like the professional and
technical workers, salaried administrators and managers, sales workers
and clerical workers that together made up 45 percent of the employed
persons in 1974.3 Both men and women work in large organizations, then,
but their experiences are shaped by very different distributions across
administrative positions.

TABLE 1—1

Number of Employees in Business Enterprises by Employment-Class Size

of Enterprise (1967)