In the United States and Europe, stenographers and secretaries were usually male in the early and middle 19th century. Like accounting and clerical work requiring literacy (and often mathematical skills), office work was a respectable occupation for the young, educated male. Successful male office workers sometimes moved into managerial positions. The business office as the domain of men was justified by the claim that business was a “manly” sort of occupation–too rough-and-tumble for the ladies, and that it was inappropriate, especially for young, single women, to be in unsupervised contact with men.

All that began to change in the late 19th century. A number of factors contributed to a shift from well-paid male office workers to less well-paid female office workers. By the late 19th century there was a growing supply of educated women, owing in part to rising standards of education. Women workers had been used for many years in factories, so there was a precedent for using them elsewhere in business. Further, it was well-known that women workers could be hired for less money than men, which made them economically attractive. When technical innovations such as the typewriter began to appear in the late 19th century, businesses sometimes used the changeover to a more “mechanized” office to replace their high-wage male workers with women. Office work was re-organized around the use of machines and “systems.” This was particularly the case in the largest businesses, such as railroads, mailorder companies and insurance companies.

In other cases, the shift from female to male workers came due to extraordinary events. World War I, for example, drew many men away from clerical positions, and sometimes they were replaced by women.

In general, by about 1920 female office workers were becoming the norm. Thousands of them worked as typists in large typing or secretarial “pools.” These were rooms with dozens of typing desks, where women worked all day translating written notes into typed correspondence.