What 1950s corporate Australia offered 'girls' who wanted to work - Ross Clennett: High Performance Recruitment Coach

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On the weekend, I was helping my auntie move house, and amongst her paperwork, I found a brochure from her first job – a trainee at the A.M.P. Society (now AMP Limited).

These days it’s called a careers page. In those days (the late 1950s) large employers had a brochure.

Here’s the employee value proposition.

Of course, ‘girls’ didn’t go to university.

Duties and opportunities include the exciting prospect of ‘machine accounting’.

These were the days before annual leave was a federally legislated minimum of four weeks.

When my auntie joined the workforce from school, women were forced to leave paid employment when they got married regardless of pregnancy status or future intentions about having a family. This was legal and widely regarded as ‘fair’ (if too many women had jobs it was seen as an unfair barrier to men gaining jobs).

In the mid-Twenieth Century employment for a women was simply a ‘phase of her life’ and not to be taken seriously – becoming a wife and mother was what a woman’s life was really about.

Note the ‘liberal assisted endowment plan’ for women who remain in service for eleven years. In other words, if by the age of 31 (at the very latest) a woman wasn’t married she was deemed ‘on the shelf’ and had no prospect of ‘being taken care of by a man’, hence the employer stepped in fill the (financial) void.

AMP Limited’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) 2022/2023 Gender Pay Gap Employer Statement notes the following:

Board of directors: 50% women; executive management: 46% women; “Head of”: 40.4% women; middle management: 48.7% women and overall workforce: 52.6% women

All of the above data points were improvements on the results from the first year they were reported (2020).

AMP’s median gender pay gap (total remuneration) is 19.9%, slightly higher than the national median (19%) but significantly lower than the median for the financial and insurance industry (26.1%).

I wonder how the 1950s executives of the A.M.P. Society would react to the fact a ‘girl’ (Alexis George, pictured below) now runs the whole place (although her base salary was, when she commenced in 2021, still half a million dollars less than her male predecessor).