At a congress of shorthand writers held in Cincinnati almost 150 years ago, a stenographer called Helen T Pierson took to the stage to rebut male clerks’ growing protests that an influx of women threatened their job security. She took issue, in particular, with the misogynistic argument that women were undercutting men’s salaries because they were willing to work for less pay.
“The injustice of underpaying [women] is so gross and so palpable that it seems an impossibility that such a wrong should continue to exist,” Pierson told the mainly male audience. “It is hard and unfair in the extreme that a woman should be underpaid simply because she is a woman, and is not only unfair, but is calculated to do much harm.”
As with software and AI today, the mass adoption of shorthand and typing changed work habits and roles. But not all workers benefited. As new technology sweeps away the last vestiges of these older office productivity tools, what can we learn about how they were applied and misapplied?
First, try not to be too optimistic.
By the 1880s, supercharged by the rapid spread of office work, the typewriter and shorthand – the 2,000-year-old technique of using written symbols to speed the recording and transcription of speech – had combined to create new job opportunities for many women.
Before office work expanded in the US and Europe, social norms confined most of them to traditional “female roles” such as teaching or domestic service. But shorthand and especially typing were marketed as particularly suited to the female mentality and physique. By 1900, three-quarters of shorthand typists in the US were women – hence the distress of male clerks. Their protests were in vain. By 1930, 95 per cent of the US profession were women.
Yet shorthand and typing were a double-edged sword. Given a chance to enter the workforce, some women thrived. For instance, many British suffragists and suffragettes were expert typists who used their office skills as levers of emancipation, for instance, to prepare, print and distribute leaflets.
Secretarial skills also helped the first women stockbrokers, journalists and publishers break into their professions. Others enjoyed secretarial work simply for the flexibility and cash it provided to develop other career paths.
But many shorthand typists were consigned to life under a very low glass ceiling, far removed from the rosy imaginings of the late 19th century’s women pioneers. The determination and sacrifices required to progress in full-time paid work were sometimes too great.
The second lesson is that the intervention of aggressive consultants, selling technology on grounds of efficiency, is often bad for the people at the sharp end of that implementation.
By the 1910s, “scientific managers”, inspired by consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor’s mechanistic push to make manufacturing more efficient, were putting speedometers on typewriters to assess productivity. One Taylor disciple, William Henry Leffingwell, author of 1917’s Scientific Office Management, obsessed over the best way secretaries should arrange a desk (“keeping stationery in desk drawers is [a] source of waste motion”), how long it should take to insert a sheet of paper in a typewriter (three one-hundredths of a minute), and whether it paid to take paper clips off correspondence before filing (it depends: it takes 10 minutes to remove one pound of clips, he calculated).
Leffingwell was naturally a big advocate of the typing pool, which grouped shorthand typists together rather than relying on “small groups of uncontrolled stenographers throughout the office who work only part of their time on letters and part on miscellaneous clerical tasks and, as is often the case, sit in absolute idleness at other times”.
Historian Lucienne Boyce, who worked as a temporary secretary in the 1970s, says: “The whole image of the typing pool was of a factory, and the women became instruments … just as you keep workers down in a factory, by giving them a tiny bit of job to do.” Boyce later became a careers adviser and saw how rarely men were directed down the secretarial path.
This was a world where “bosses, almost always male, literally dictate to female clericals”, as academic Catherine Rankovic has put it. As the century progressed, the combination of complete control, a rigid focus on efficiency, and lower status sucked from the office what little autonomy and joy women had hoped they might achieve there. It created what sociologist Margery Davies called a “secretarial proletariat”.
Obstacles that stood in the way of these women included formal or informal marriage bars, inadequate or non-existent maternity leave or childcare options, and looming disparities between the pay and promotion opportunities offered to women, not to mention casual sexism and outright sexual harassment.
A third lesson is that the same forces that lead to the birth of one technology can also hasten its demise at the hands of the next wave of development. The earlier technology’s users are often the unwitting victims. The Dictaphone, the electric typewriter, the computer and the internet finally put paid to the typing pool and consigned shorthand dictation to the shredder of secretarial skills.
With the advent of the desktop personal computer, the typewriter became a “keyboard” and the association of typing with women’s work broke down. Executives started to realise the quickest route from the idea in their heads to the memo or letter was through their own fingertips. “Now computers have come along, and ‘typing’ is ‘keyboarding’. Suddenly, voila! Men can type,” Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist, said in a 2007 commencement address at her alma mater Smith College. “Gives you faith in men’s ability to change, doesn’t it?”
So the dream that many women nursed in the late 19th century – that innovations such as shorthand and typing would provide a route into the workplace and a launch platform for promotion – was, for many, a hollow one. Only in the 2020s did women managers start to outnumber secretaries in the list of most common roles for women in the US.
But there is a fourth, and more upbeat, lesson from the rise and fall of the secretarial proletariat. New technologies can create opportunities for a smaller number of workers to cultivate skills that enable them to shape better jobs for themselves.
Secretaries have morphed into high-value personal and executive assistants, for instance, increasingly sought after for their command of the newest office tools.
Rebecca Siciliano, managing director of agency Tiger Recruitment, says a lot of her clients “want someone [who] is AI and tech savvy”.
These assistants must provide the expert human touch needed to juggle diaries packed with virtual and in-person meetings, and to represent their boss inside and outside the business. They need to know when to delegate to bots the more mundane tasks of taking minutes or updating spreadsheets. The best command salaries of £85,000 annually, according to Siciliano. Some may rise to become chiefs of staff and operations managers.
Much has changed since Pierson made the case for women in the workplace. The manual typewriter is long gone in most offices. The smartphone and AI are eradicating the last remnants of need for written shorthand. And despite Tiger and its clients’ best efforts to broaden the pool of executive assistants, only a small minority are men.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026