What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers.
I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people.
In my current gig we have an actual full time office manager and it's fucking amazing.
The jobs created in the last 20 years have been worse paid and less secure than the jobs that were destroyed. The granddaughters of the 60s secretaries are baristas, nurses, cleaners, retail workers and other jobs with terrible working conditions and security.
That's the problem of the current system, losing jobs is fine as long as they are replaced by better jobs. When they are replaced by worse jobs you have a broken system. And we have a very broken system.
Ironically it doesn't free up the people who used to do them to go about doing what they want with their time - it only frees them up in the same way that the computer will free up memory, the people are able to be allocated to other places in the economy. The observation that automation tends not to free people in any genuine sense even runs against Keynes' predictions for how much we'd be working today.
UK, non-government public sector, very senior people still have secretaries - often described as personal assistants. The PAs handle interfacing and information flow, the senior people can get on with the thinking.
A PA is not a secretary years ago I worked on organising a large event and one of the committee member was the PA to the county fire chief.
She was awesome, at the first meeting she had worked out from previous years all the key things the other members of the committee needed to do - written all the letters and handed them to us to sign.
I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people.
In my current gig we have an actual full time office manager and it's fucking amazing.