No woman in Norway has to work after 5pm, said the newspaper article strapline.
Reminds me of the good old days in the UK, before the Sex Discrimination Act, when women were often not allowed to work after 5pm.
For example Post Office telephone operators. The night shift was a male preserve – it was considered either indecorous or unsafe for women to be out on their own at night.
Not long after the SDA came into force I ran into a problem with the Building Society & my application for a mortgage – the (very old-fashioned looking) form demanded details of my husband’s occupation & income. I was not sure that this was in fact illegal, & so tried to get the phone number for the newly established Equal Opportunities Commission in Manchester in order to ask their advice. I waited until I got home in the evening, being a good girl who did not waste my employer’s money on private phone calls at work.
The operator manning Directory Enquiries could not find the number, asked me to repeat the name again & then asked what the organisation was for. When I told him, he responded with ‘Oh, you’re one of those are you’ & put the phone down.
When I did go back to the Building Society & queried the form the man dealing with my application was desperately embarrassed & said, Terribly sorry, that’s an old form, it should have been changed.
But the assertion about the working hours of women in Norway can be true only if night work is restricted to men – no women nurses, policemen, power station operatives, train drivers ...
I expect they were taliking about nice office jobs where one works only nine to five.
Links
Sex Discrimination Act 1975
The historical development of BT
