His and hers: Women's participation in the labour market

The emergence of the 'knowledge worker' has had important implications for the role of women in the labour force. Historically women's participation in the world of work has always equalled men's. The lady of leisure sitting in her parlour was the rarest of exceptions even in a wealthy 19th century society. A farm, a craftsman's business or a small shop had to be run by a couple to be viable. As late as the beginning of the 20th century, a doctor could not start a practice until he had got married; he needed a wife to make appointments, open the door, take patients' histories and send out bills.

But although women have always worked, since time immemorial the jobs they have done have been different from men's. There was men's work and there was women's work.

Countless women in the Bible go to the well to fetch water, but not one man. There never was a male spinster. Knowledge work, on the other hand, is 'unisex', not because of feminist pressure but because it can be done equally well by both sexes. That said, the first modern knowledge jobs were designed for only one or the other sex.

Teaching as a profession was invented in 1794, the year the Ecole Normale was founded in Paris, and was seen strictly as a man's job. Sixty years later, during the Crimean war of 1853-56, Florence Nightingale founded the second new knowledge profession.

There were no women doctors in Europe until the 1890s. But one of the earliest European women to get a medical doctorate, the great Italian educator Maria Montessori, reportedly said: 'I am not a woman doctor; I am a doctor who happens to be a woman.' The same logic applies to all knowledge work. Knowledge workers, whatever their sex, are professionals, applying the same knowledge, doing the same work, governed by the same standards and judged by the same results.

High-knowledge workers such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, clerics and teachers have been around for a long time, although their number has increased exponentially in the past 100 years. The largest group of knowledge workers, however, barely existed until the start of the 20th century, and took off only after the second world war. They are knowledge technologists - people who do much of their work with their hands (and to that extent are the successors to skilled workers), but whose pay is determined by the knowledge between their ears, acquired in formal education rather than through apprenticeship. They include X-ray technicians, physiotherapists, ultrasound specialists, psychiatric case workers, dental technicians and scores of others. In the past 30 years, medical technologists have been the fastest growing segment of the labour force in America, and probably in Britain as well.

In the next 20 or 30 years the number of knowledge technologists in computers, manufacturing and education is likely to grow even faster. Office technologists such as paralegals are also proliferating. And it is no accident that yesterday's 'secretary' is rapidly turning into an 'assistant', having become the manager of the boss's office and of his work. Within two or three decades, knowledge technologists will become the dominant group in the workforce in all developed countries, occupying the same position that unionised factory workers held at the peak of their power in the 1950s and '60s.

The most important thing about these knowledge workers is that they do not identify themselves as 'workers' but as 'professionals'. Many of them spend a good deal of their time doing largely unskilled work, e.g., straightening out patients' beds, answering the telephone or filing.

Such workers have two main needs: formal education that enables them to enter knowledge work in the first place, and continuing education throughout their working lives to keep their knowledge up to date. For the old high-knowledge professionals such as doctors, clerics and lawyers, formal education has been available for many centuries.

But for knowledge technologists, only a few countries so far provide systematic and organised preparation. Over the next few decades, educational institutions to prepare knowledge technologists will grow rapidly in all developed and emerging countries, just as new institutions to meet new requirements have always appeared in the past. What is different this time is the need for the continuing education of already well-trained and highly knowledgeable adults. Schooling traditionally stopped when work began. In the knowledge society it never stops.

Knowledge is unlike traditional skills, which change very slowly. A museum near Barcelona in Spain contains a vast number of the hand tools used by the skilled craftsmen of the late Roman empire which any craftsman today would instantly recognise, because they are very similar to the tools still in use. For the purposes of skill training, therefore, it was reasonable to assume that whatever had been learned by age 17 or 18 would last for a lifetime.

Conversely, knowledge rapidly becomes obsolete, and knowledge workers regularly have to go back to school. Continuing education of already highly educated adults will therefore become a big growth area in the next society.

But most of it will be delivered in non-traditional ways, ranging from weekend seminars to online training programmes and in any number of places, from a traditional university to the students' home. The information revolution, which is expected to have an enormous impact on educational and on traditional schools and universities, will probably have an even greater education of knowledge workers.

(Tomorrow: A knowledge worker's primary allegiance)