paper clip case study

Today, a look at the unfinished paper clip. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

S ome years ago, I sent a paper off to an editor. I happened to put it together with a paper clip I'd carried back from Jugoslavia. He was delighted. He collected paper clips. This was one he hadn't seen. After that, I found a different clip for everything I sent him. I never ran out of variations.

In this series we've seen that the true mother of invention is the creative pleasure it gives us. The vast variety of paper clips testifies to the pleasure they've given their inventors. Still, the paper clip did fulfill an old and nagging need.

Until this century we bundled papers with ribbon or string. If the sheaf was small enough, we used a straight pin -- even a clothespin. Engineer/historian Henry Petroski has looked into this problem. He finds a lot of late-19th-century experimentation but only one patent, from 1887. It was a soft metal clip you could bend into place to hold paper.

Now: pick up a modern paper clip and study its complex simplicity. It is a wondrous piece of compressed ingenuity. The Norwegian Johan Vaaler is usually called the inventor of the paper clip. Norway had no patent office, so he filed an American patent for a set of square and triangular clips.

That was in 1901. And maybe it was the first paper clip patent. But there's a catch. The fully evolved paper clip we use today showed up two years earlier in an 1899 patent. The catch is, it wasn't a paper-clip patent. Instead, William Middlebrook patented a machine that would make wire paper clips.

In one corner of his patent drawing is the clip his machine would make. It has the round top and bottom so familiar today. We call that the Gem paper clip because Middlebrook invented his machine for the Gem Company, in England.

Still, the Gem is only a compromise solution to a very hard problem. Consider the pitfalls waiting for a new paper clip. It should exert a clinging grip. It shouldn't tangle with other clips in a box. It should be easy to apply and remove. It shouldn't tear the paper or leave rust marks. It should be cheap and easy to make. Its use should be obvious.

One Gem clip maker said he got ten letters a month suggesting improvements. But people could improve one area only at the expense of another.

So the paper clip remains as a tantalizing exercise in elegance and sophistication. It dangles a lingering challenge. For this invention is not yet done. We still wait for the perfect paper clip. And who knows:

Maybe it is YOU who will, finally, give it to us.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.

(Theme music)

Petroski, H., The Evolution of Artifacts.  American Scientist , Vol. 80, September/October 1992, pp. 416-420.

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The History and Invention of the Paperclip

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Historical references describe fastening papers together as early as the 13th century. During this time, people put ribbon through parallel incisions in the upper left-hand corner of pages. Later, people started to wax the ribbons to make them stronger and easier to undo and redo. This was the way people clipped papers together for the next six hundred years.

In 1835, a New York physician named John Ireland Howe invented the machine for mass-producing straight pins, which then became a popular way to fasten papers together (although they were not originally designed for that purpose). Straight pins were designed to be used in sewing and tailoring, to temporally fasten cloth together.

Johan Vaaler

Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with degrees in electronics, science, and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. He received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899, as Norway had no patent laws at that time.

Vaaler was an employee at a local invention office when he created the paperclip. He received an American patent in 1901. The patent abstract says, "It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions." Vaaler was the first person to patent a paperclip design, although other unpatented designs might have existed first.

American inventor Cornelius J. Brosnan filed for an American patent for a paperclip in 1900. He called his invention the "Konaclip."

A History of Paperclips

It was a company called the Gem Manufacturing Ltd. of England that first designed the double oval-shaped, standard paperclip. This familiar and famous paperclip was and still is referred to as the "Gem" clip. William Middlebrook of Waterbury, Connecticut, patented a machine for making paperclips of the Gem design in 1899. The Gem paperclip was never patented.

People have been re-inventing the paperclip over and over again. The designs that have been the most successful are the Gem with its double oval shape, the "non-skid" which held in place well, the "ideal" used for thick wads of paper , and the "owl" paperclip that does not get tangled up with other paperclips.

World War II Protest

During World War II, Norwegians were prohibited from wearing any buttons with the likeness or initials of their king on them. In protest, they started wearing paperclips, because paperclips were a Norwegian invention whose original function was to bind together. This was a protest against the Nazi occupation and wearing a paperclip could have gotten them arrested.

A paperclip's metal wire can be easily unfolded. Several devices call for a very thin rod to push a recessed button which the user might only rarely need. This is seen on most CD-ROM drives as an "emergency eject" should the power fail. Various smartphones require the use of a long, thin object such as a paperclip to eject the SIM card. Paperclips can also be bent into a sometimes effective lock-picking device. Some types of handcuffs can be unfastened using paper clips. 

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The Importance of the Paper Clip

The blogger James Ward studies common office supplies—to understand not just their history, but their cultural impact, as well.

In late 2009, the London-based blogger James Ward and the artist Ed Ross began a movement to celebrate "stationery"—the term for office supplies, basically, in the U.K.—that they called the Stationery Club. Once a month, they would use the hashtag #stationeryclub , asking other Twitter users to join in their appreciation of common objects.

But in early 2010, Ward had the idea to host the club in person, like a book club, except about pens and paper clips and Post-it notes. He wrote a blog post, asked people to join him in a London pub, and then waited. "I had no idea if anyone was going to come. I kind of thought this could just be me sitting in a pub holding a pen on my own," he said. "Eventually, we took over the whole pub, and there was just one table left of normal people... I was just like, 'I don't know what this is.'"

It's easy to see why Ward hadn't expected the turnout: Office supplies, frankly, make for a boring conversation topic. Plus, today's workspace centers on screens—on laptops and desktops and tablets and smartphones—that do said office supplies' work. But Ward is a fan of the things that seem dull to others. Every year, he hosts The Boring Conference , "a one-day celebration of the mundane, the ordinary, the obvious and the overlooked—subjects often considered trivial and pointless, but when examined more closely reveal themselves to be deeply fascinating." And this year, he's also written a collection of essays on the invention of various office items, published in a book called The Perfection of the Paper Clip , out Tuesday in the U.S.

"I'm interested in finding out the stories of all kinds of objects we use every day and that we take for granted just because we use them," Ward told me. "There's this sense of nostalgia, that [these supplies] remind you of when you went to school... There's also this sense of potential, that every object has the potential to change your life, whether it's the notebook you're going to use to write that novel, or the highlighters you'll use to pass that exam."

In his prologue, for example, he muses on some old paper clips he finds:

The first compartment is currently filled with 67 steel paper clips. I can't remember when I bought these paper clips, or where I got them from, and the clips themselves offer no clues. I can only apologize for the vagueness of my records. But before you criticize me for this oversight, perhaps I am simply a product of my environment. As a supposed civilization, we have been so blasé—so arrogant—that we haven't even bothered to keep a proper record of who invented the paper clip.

Ward goes on to write about the invention of a collection of other office supplies because to him, each one plays an important part in how we think about technology. (This mentality is similar to the one behind Object Lessons , an ongoing series featured on The Atlantic about the secret lives of ordinary things.) A paper clip isn't just a paper clip—it can be associated with a unique meaning depending on what you're using it for, whether it's using them to procrastinate around your lunch break or to add as the final touch to organize that paper you've spent weeks working on.

Meaning only grows deeper as tools like paper clips and file folders are abandoned in favor of the virtual ones on a laptop. Before digital technology spawned CDs and MP3s, Ward points out, people wanted to improve upon the crackle and pop of recorded sound. Once vinyl records were phased out, however, people associated those imperfections with the "warmth" of a bygone musical era. It's the same thing with writing things down in a notebook instead of a blank document on a screen. There's a special quality to jotting an idea down somewhere impermanent, somewhere a cloud won't be able to recover the information written down by hand.

Ward says he doesn't play favorites among his boring objects, but some, like the Post-it Note, have a greater cultural impact than others. As he highlights in the book:

The Post-it Note remains iconic. In Sex and the City , when Carrie Bradshaw meets up with Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha to tell them that her boyfriend has broken up with her, she doesn't say 'Berger broke up with me on a sticky note'; she says he broke up with her 'on a Post-it.' Romy and Michelle would have impressed no one if they'd claimed to have invented the 'sticky note'; it had to be the Post-it. Like the Pritt Stick or Sellotape, the Post-it has become not only the generic term, but also the definitive term for its type.

Waxing poetic on the Post-it Note may seem overkill, but that's exactly what Ward wanted to do: to show that these objects play with each other, affect each other, and in turn, affect us.

"It's an ecosystem," Ward explained. "Each of these individual items play their roles and support each other, so a pen is no use without paper, a paper is no use without a pen, so they have these symbiotic relationships where they all feed off each other."

Besides, he adds, there's a reason why they've stuck around for so long—even if their origin stories haven't been meticulously recorded. "There are stories behind these objects, there are people behind these objects... and they've made things that have made our lives easier even if it's in a very small way," he said. "We need those smaller things to make the bigger things."

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Title: abrupt learning in transformers: a case study on matrix completion.

Abstract: Recent analysis on the training dynamics of Transformers has unveiled an interesting characteristic: the training loss plateaus for a significant number of training steps, and then suddenly (and sharply) drops to near--optimal values. To understand this phenomenon in depth, we formulate the low-rank matrix completion problem as a masked language modeling (MLM) task, and show that it is possible to train a BERT model to solve this task to low error. Furthermore, the loss curve shows a plateau early in training followed by a sudden drop to near-optimal values, despite no changes in the training procedure or hyper-parameters. To gain interpretability insights into this sudden drop, we examine the model's predictions, attention heads, and hidden states before and after this transition. Concretely, we observe that (a) the model transitions from simply copying the masked input to accurately predicting the masked entries; (b) the attention heads transition to interpretable patterns relevant to the task; and (c) the embeddings and hidden states encode information relevant to the problem. We also analyze the training dynamics of individual model components to understand the sudden drop in loss.

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Computer Chips and Paper Clips: Technology and Women's Employment, Volume II: Case Studies and Policy Perspectives (1987)

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Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

Computer Chips and Paper Clips Technology and Moments Employment <~1 ~ VOLUME II Case Studies and Policy Perspectives Heidi I. Hartmann, Editor Panel on Technology and Women's Employment Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education National Research Council NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS Washington, D.C. 1987

National Academy Press · 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW · Washington, DC 20418 NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance. This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The National Research Council was established by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy's purposes of furthering knowledge and advising the federal government. The Council operates in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy under the authority of its congressional charter of 1863, which establishes the Academy as a private, nonprofit, self-governing membership corporation. The Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in the conduct of their services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. It is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. The National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine were established in 1964 and 1970, respectively, under the current charter of the National Academy of Sciences. This project has been supported by funding from the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Commission for Employment Policy, the Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and by the National Research Council (NRC) Fund. The NRC Fund is a pool of private, discretionary, nonfederal funds that is used to support a program of Academy-initiated studies of national issues in which science and technology figure significantly. The NRC Fund consists of contributions from a consortium of private foundations including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Academy Industry Program, which seeks annual contributions from companies that are concerned with the health of U.S. science and technology and with public policy issues with technology content; and the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering endowments. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Revised for vol. 2) National Research Council (U.S.~. Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues. Panel on Technology and Women's Employment. Computer chips and paper clips. Bibliography: v. 1, p. 183-199. Includes index. Contents: v. 1. [without special title] v. 2. Case studies and policy perspectives / Heidi I. Hartmann, editor. 1. Women white collar workers Effects of technological innovations on. 2. Office practice Automation. 3. Microelectronics Social aspects. 4. Women Employment. 5. Women Employment- Goverment policy United States. I. Hartmann, Heidi I. II. Kraut, Robert E. III. Tilly, Louise. HD6331.18.M39N38 1986 331.4 ' 8165137 '0973 86-18113 ISBN 0-309-03688-7 (fir. 1) ISBN 0-309-03727-1 (v. 2) Printed in the United States of America

Panel on Technology and Women's Employment LOUISE A. TILLY (Chair), Committee on Historical Studies, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research TAMAR D. BERMANN, Work Research Institutes, OsIo, Norway FRANGINE D. BLAU, Department of Economics and Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois DENNIS CHAMOT, Professional Employees Department, AFRO, Washington, D.C. MARTIN L. ERNST, Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge, Mass. ROSLYN FELDBERG, Massachusetts Nurses Association, Boston, Mass. WILLIAM N. HUBBARD, JR., Hickory Corners, Mich. GLORIA T. JOHNSON, International Union of Electronic, Technical, Salaried, and Machine Workers, AFL-CIO, Washington, D.C. ROBERT E. KRAUT, Bell Communications Research, Inc., Morristown, N.~. SHIRLEY M. MALCOM, American Association for - the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. MICHAEL J. PIORE, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology FREDERICK A. ROESCH, Citicorp, New York TERESA A. SULLIVAN, Population Research Center, University of Texas DONALD J. TREIMAN, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles ROBERT K. YIN, COSMOS Corporation, Washington, D.C. PATRICIA ZAVELLA, Merrill College, University of California, Santa Cruz HEIDI I. HARTMANN, Study Director LUCILE A. DIGIROLAMO, Staff Associate GILLIAN MARCELLE, Editorial Assistant ,¢ ~ · ·— 111

Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues ALICE S. ILCHMAN (Chair), President, Sarah Lawrence College CECILIA P. BURCIAGA, Office of the Dean and Vice Provost, Stanford University CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN, Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Russell Sage Foundation, New York LAWRENCE M. KAHN, Department of Economics and Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois GENE E. KOFKE, Montclair, N.~. ROBERT E. KRAUT, Bell Communications Research, Inc., Morristown, N.~. JEAN BAKER MILLER, Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, WellesTey College ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Georgetown University Law Center GARY ORFIELD, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago NAOMI R. QUINN, Department of Anthropology, Duke University ISABEL V. SAWMILL, The Urban Institute, Washington, D.C. ROBERT M. SOLOW, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology LOUISE A. TILLY, Committee on Historical Studies, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research DONALD J. TREIMAN, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles 1V

CONTENTS, VOLUME I.. PREFACE . Contents · . V11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I. OVERVIEW xv Technology, Women, and Work: Policy Perspectives 3 Eli Ginaberg II. CASE STUDIES OF WOMEN WORKERS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY The Technological Transformation of White-Collar Work: A Case Study of the Insurance Industry Barbara Baran "Machines Instead of Clerks": Technology and the Feminization of Bookkeeping, 1910-1950 Sharon Hartman Strom New Technology and Office Tradition: The Not-So-Changing World of the Secretary 98 Mary C. Murphree 25 63

v' Integrated Circuits/Segregated Labor: Women in Computer-Related Occupations and High-Tech Industries Myra H. Strober and Carolyn L. Arnold III. TECHNOLOGY AND TRENDS IN WOMEN'S EMPLOYMENT Women's Employment and Technological Change: A Historical Perspective Claudia Goldin Recent Trends in Clerical Employment: The Impact of Technological Change H. Allan Hunt and Timothy L. Hunt Restructuring Work: Temporary, Part-Time, and At-Home Employment 268 Eileen Appelbaum CONTENTS 136 .................... 185 223 IV. POLICY PERSPECTIVES Employer Policies to Enhance the Application of Office System Technology to Clerical Work .. Alan F. Westin ............. 313 New Office and Business Technologies: The Structure of Education and (Re)Training Opportunities... Bryna Shore Fraser The New Technology and the New Economy: Some Implications for Equal Employment Opportunity Thierry J. Noyelle Managing Technological Change: Responses of Government, Employers, and Trade Unions in Western Europe and Canada............................ Felicity Henwood and; Sally Wyatt BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF CONTRIBUTORS... 343 ..373 395 ....433

Contents, Volume ~ 1. TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND WOMEN WORKERS IN THE OFFICE 2. HISTORICAL PATTERNS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE 3. EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE: EMPLOYMENT LEVELS AND OCCUPATIONAL SHIFTS 4. EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE: THE QUALITY OF EMPLOYMENT 5. C ONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS REFERENCES BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF PANEL MEMBERS AND STAFF INDEX ·. V11

Preface Striking advances in microelectronic and telecommunications technology have transformed many worlds of work. These changes have revolutionized information storage, processing, and retrieval, with immediate and long-range consequences for clerical work. Since women nearly 15 million of them are the overwhelming majority of clerical workers, they are and will be disproportionately affected by this type of technological change. Jobs may be created or eliminated, but they are also transformed. So far, knowledge about these large processes of change has been scattered and in- complete. Thus, there is great need for more systematic evaluation and understanding of technological change and its specific effects on the conditions of and opportunities for women's employment. In light of this need, the Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues established its Pane} on Technology and Women's Employment in March 1984. The tasks of the panel included gathering existing data, identifying areas in which re- search is most needed and commissioning scholars to undertake this research, and preparing a conference and a two-volume report to present the panel's findings and recommendations. This work was supported by the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Commission for Employment Policy, the 1X

x PREFA CE Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the National Research Council fund. A number of questions faced the panel: To what extent do cur- rent changes differ from earlier ones? Is the new microelectronic and telecommunications technology creating or eliminating jobs? In what ways is it affecting the quality of employment for those whose job organization and content are being transformed? Are there differential effects that depend on the skill, occupation, in- dustry, or demographic characteristics, such as minority status or age of workers? If jobs disappear or change drastically, what kind of support training, retraining, or relocation might be needed for displaced workers? What institutional arrangements might be necessary or desirable for planning and implementing change or devising support programs? The panel's answers to these questions are presented in Vol- ume ~ (a listing of its contents precedes this preface). This second volume gathers many of the papers commissioned by the pane! during the course of its work. Each illuminates, from the author's own perspective, one or more aspects of those questions examined by the panel. Often these perspectives differ, indicating the con- tradictory interpretations of fact that characterize the research on technology and employment, particularly because the phenomena being studied are still unfolding and the data are very much less than adequate to the task. Each paper has been revised by its authorts) to take into account the comments of panel members and others who participated in a workshop held in February 1985 to discuss early versions of the papers. Professor Eli Ginzberg's overview provides a context for the volume. He presents his view of the changes that have taken place in the participation of women in the labor market, noting that some of the economic sectors that in the past provided the bulk of job growth for women workers may no longer do so, at least partly due to new office technologies. He stresses, however, that technological change is a critical factor in fostering economic growth and creating new types of jobs. His policy prescriptions include continued research and development to enhance techno- logical change and economic growth, full employment, improved education and retraining, continued enforcement of equal employ- ment opportunity laws and regulations, and increased provision of child care. TAT _ I 1 · · d . ~ ~ . ~ . ~

PREFA CE Xt The four case studies in Part IT describe the impact of infor- mation technology in the insurance industry, among bookkeepers (between 1910 and 1950), among secretaries, and in computer- related occupations. The first three case studies trace how the opportunities of women workers tend to change along with al- terations in the organization of work and the implementation of innovations. Barbara Baran, Sharon Strom, and Mary Murphree all argue that women's opportunities have become more limited as the division of labor has become increasingly structured. Baran notes the current contradiction within the insurance industry that as jobs become more skilled in many ways as a result of comput- erization they also offer less mobility; she also anticipates declines in the number of jobs likely to be available to clerical workers, particularly the least-skilled workers. Strom's history of changes in women's role in bookkeeping, an important clerical occupa- tion, gives equal weight to changes in the organization of work and to the various innovations in calculating machines available to bookkeepers over the years. Up to 1950, bookkeepers grew in number and became preponderantly female; their work was in- creasingly tied to machines and their opportunities increasingly circumscribed. Murphree's contemporary case study shows how the effects of office technologies on secretaries vary according to the way these technologies are used. A critical variable, Murphree finds, is the number of bosses the secretary serves; accordingly, with new equipment, her work may become more or less chal- lenging. In nearly all cases, however, Murphree finds that the patrimonial nature of office work, in particular its strong reliance on differences in gendered roles, remains little changed. Strober and Arnold examine the newly emerging occupations related to computers: computer scientists and systems analysts, computer programmers, and computer operators. Using data available from the Census Bureau, they find that even in these new occupations gender-based earnings differentials exist. One explanation suggested IS that women and men in these occupa- tions tend to work in different industries, with women less likely than men to work in the "high-tech" industries. The pessimistic impression left by these case studies of the im- pact of computers (and their forerunners) is somewhat mitigated by the sweeping historical analysis provided by Claudia Goldin. The first of three authors in Part Ill who connects technological change with trends in women's employment, Goldin reviews the

· ~ at' PREFA CE history of ~vomen's employment and productivity growth since the 1800s. She reports that across industries women have tended to increase their representation where productivity growth has been greatest and also notes that the entrance of women into manufac- turing in the 1800s, where technological and organizational change was especially pronounced, tended to raise women's wages. To- gether these facts indicate that technological and organizational change generally enhance women's opportunities. In the more recent period, however, Goldin sees the increase in women's ed- ucation as the single most important factor in changing women's labor force status. Alian Hunt and Timothy Hunt, in their review of trends in clerical employment from 1940 to the early 1980s, attempt to iden- tify specific impacts of office automation. Like Ginzberg, they note that it Is easier to attach technological explanations to areas of decreasing employment than to anticipate the new jobs technol- ogy may create. Their findings suggest that although employment growth in clerical jobs has slowed (probably permanently), techno- logical change cannot in most instances be identified as the reason. For example, despite the increased capital investment in the finan- cial sector, no trend toward increased productivity (and possible job displacement) was discerned. Eileen Appelbaum points to other important trends in the recent period: the significant increase in temporary work, shifts in part-time work, and the modest increase in home-based work. All these shifts, she argues, are facilitated by computerization, but also reflect changes in the organization of work. In Appelbaum's view, these new forms of work are likely to become increasingly important as employers continue to face the need to minimize costs. Although new work may provide some important options for women workers, Appelbaum believes that on the whole these trends have more negative consequences than positive ones. The four papers in Part IV provide policy perspectives on important subjects. Alan Westin reviews recent experiences of a sample of major employers with office automation and offers his suggestions for how best to implement new office system technolo- gies. He reports that increasing attention is being given in work- places to enhancing the quality of employment and notes that the most important factor in determining how well an employer uses new technology is the overall quality of its human resources policy. Bryna Fraser describes available options for attaining education

PREEN CE · · ~ x''t and training related to new technologies and recommends impor- tant improvements in the delivery of education and training. Like many of the authors in the collection, she notes the importance of continuing education over a lifetime. Thierry Noyelle, on the basis of his analysis of changes in the service sector, argues that edu- cation will become even more important in the future in ensuring employment opportunity. Like Appelbaum, Baran, and others, Noyelle believes the structure of employment opportunities within firms is undergoing fundamental change. Internal labor markets, with clear job ladders providing upward mobility, are disappear- ing. Instead, increased hiring of skilled workers is occurring, and workers must have greater skills to obtain entry-level jobs; on- thejob training is a less sure route to upward mobility for the less skilled. Felicity Henwood and Sally Wyatt, two researchers from the United Kingdom, provide an overview of employment policies related to technological change in Western Europe. They note that workers are more involved in decisions involving the im- plementation of technological change in many European countries than they are in the United States. Henwood and Wyatt also re- view European education and training policies and policies related to easing unemployment, some of which may be due to technologi- cal change. Throughout, they stress that women, because of their specific locations in paid and unpaid employment, tend to have perspectives and needs different from those of men. They note in particular that women have often been more sensitive to issues concerning quality of work. The panel offers these papers, with their divergent viewpoints, not only because they were helpful to it in its own deliberations, but also in the belief that they will stimulate further discussion and research. The issues raised in these papers about the current transformations in employment concern both men and women workers, although the particular examples are taken primarily from areas of predominant employment for women. LOUISE A. TILLY, Chair HEIDI I. HARTMANN, Study Director Pane! on Technology and Women's Employment

Acknowledgments These papers were commissioned by the pane} to inform its work. The authors have earned our appreciation for the insight and timeliness of their research. Many of them present here the fruits of original data-collection efforts, vastly more involved than could be described in the space allotted to them here. Others have spent considerable effort to create consistent data series from published and unpublished sources. All have brought their considerable analytical skills to bear on questions of importance to the panel. Thanks also to the pane] members for identifying topics for the papers, thinking carefully about the questions that needed to be addressed, and reviewing the work of the authors at many stages. Even after the major effort of summarizing research results in a written product has been completed, producing a published volume of collected papers is a formidable task. IJucile DiGiro- lamo, staff associate to the panel, ably organized much of the process, from the contracting and fiscal management involved in commissioning papers to keeping track of the numerous drafts and assisting in checking references and tables. She ably elicited coop- eration from the authors in matters both of format and substance. Gillian Marcelle, a student intern with the panel, who served as xv

xvl A CKNOWLEDGMENTS editorial assistant for this volume, made important intellectual contributions to the overall shape of the volume. She also edited several of the papers, making organizational and substantive im- provements. In this era of incomplete automation, many of these papers were produced on word-processing systems incompatible with that used by the National Academy Press. Much of the translation and cleanup involved were done by William Vaughan, staff assistant to the panel, and Estelle Miller, electronic composi- tion specialist, National Academy Press, in addition to Lucile and Gillian. Estelle Miller used laser composition software to produce camera-ready copy. Nancy Winchester, project editor, National Academy Press, supervised the production of the manuscript. To all we express our appreciation for a great deal of hard work, often performed under tight time pressures. Throughout this process, too, the authors were unusually responsive. We also thank Alice S. [Ichman, chair of the Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues, for the many ways in which she facilitated the panel's work. Eugenia Grohman, associate director for reports for the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, provided useful advice and coordinated production with the Press. David A. GosTin, executive director of the commission, has our appreciation for his continued support of the work of the committee and its panels. Several organizations made this report possible through their financial support. We thank both the organizations and the in- dividuals who provided liaison. At the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, we thank Collis Phillips, Mary Mur- phree, and Roberta McKay. In addition, we would like to recognize Lenora Cole-Alexander, former director of the Women's Bureau, for her interest in and strong support of the project. Carol Romero and her staff at the National Commission for Employment Policy provided the impetus and the funds for a major review of cleri- cal employment trends, which was carried out by AlIan Hunt and Timothy Hunt and reported briefly here. Beverly Milkman and Richard Walton, at the Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, aided the panel with a grant to allow it to complete the project in a timely manner. Crucial early funding was provided by the National Research Council Fund. LOUISE A. TILLY HEIDI I. HARTMANN

This companion to Volume I presents individually authored papers covering the history, economics, and sociology of women's work and the computer revolution. Topics include the implications for equal employment opportunity in light of new technologies; a case study of the insurance industry and of women in computer-related occupations; a study of temporary, part-time, and at-home employment; and education and retraining opportunities.

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