What was life like in the workplace if you are a woman or bringing up a young family in the 80s?

[Martinii]

I was only a small child in the 80s, so I can't really remember it.

There's always people saying how wonderful the 80s were, and you can't deny the music, films, and fashion were great. But that's always from women who were either a child or teen during the decade where life can be fairly carefree (like any decade as a young person).

I'm watching Working Girl, and it made me think how women were expected to wear skirts, tights, heals, etc. My mothers experience of bringing us up in the 80s as a single mum wasn't rosy, and I know she wouldn't look back in great fondness (except maybe the music).

So if you were working (as in an adult rather than a teen doing shifts for pocket money) or you were bringing up a young family, what was it like?

Where I worked in the public sector, everyone wore want they wanted. I usually wore jeans. Senior managers dressed smartly but that's the same today.

I started work mid 80s after going to Uni

I worked with computers in offices with a minority of woman. Only one of my jobs had dress code - skirts rather than trousers, blouses rather than T-shirts. Thankfully not requiring heels.

Smoking in offices and lunchtime boozing definitely a thing.

I was fortunate that environments I worked in didn't have much in the way of sexism

I didn't have my children until late 90s early 00s. I only took 6 months maternity as couldn't afford to take the year that was allowed.

My sister had her children in 70s and 80s and used Terry nappies because they lasted for more than one child (she had 6).

Lineflow - with holes in the side. 😂

Often someone would file them the wrong way and you couldn't read them so you would have to undo and re-file.

I started working as a dentist in the late 80s. A lot of patients would comment that they’d never seen a female dentist before. One middle aged lady had a check up but when she went back to reception asked if she could see a male dentist next visit. I was stood in reception at the time. Her exact words were “ it’s nothing personal but I prefer to see a male dentist or doctor, you do understand what I mean”. In other words women really shouldn’t be in professional jobs, they are not really good enough. She was very pleasant and the appointment was uneventful, but it was the most misogynist moment in my career.
I would frequently be told that it was a nice little job until I married and had children.
After 35+ years I think they have all realised that it is my career not a hobby.
I bought the practice in the early 90s. Even now I still get people asking if I’m a dental nurse when I tell them what I do.

Most women in the 80s still had long career breaks in the 80s although out of my year , total of 80 and women made up a third, most of the women worked full time or part time until we all started retiring over the last few years.
I still work one day a week but thanks to working for 35 yrs I have a brilliant pension, again it raises eyebrows amongst contemporaries that I am able to retire at 60.
I do have an air of the ditsy blonde about me so my IQ is often grossly underestimated. It’s actually quite an advantage when people have low expectations of you, I get out of having to “contribute”.

In the early 80's in the offices I worked in was mainly men and yes the usual misogyny. Any woman who dated a few of the blokes became the office bicycle. Even my dad said this as if it was funny. (He worked there too!) I put him right straight away. I turned down a few dates on the strength of that too! Hardly a problem, I only fancied one of them and even I realised he was weird!

Was mainly a white male establishment and there was racial stuff too. A member of the national front worked there (I won't use capital letters for them!!). He was trying to tell my dad that no Foreigners helped us during the 2nd world war. He meant of course people of colour. My dad put him right mentioning the Indians and West Indians.

Later I began to work for the NHS. The only problem there was people smoking in offices!!

I had my first child in 1991 and worked in local government. Before me ( in my department) anyone who returned to work after having a baby had to be full-time. At that time there was one woman I worked with who had done this, out of about 30. Full-time nursery care was rare and prohibitively expensive, so you’d have to have a very high paid job to make it worthwhile, so most mothers didn’t, they just stopped working initially, and then maybe picked up an evening job in a supermarket when their husband was at home with the baby. Picking a career back up would come later when children had started school, and then only if they were lucky enough to have a grandparent or childminder or friend to collect their child so they could work full-time. There was no part time, no flexible time. Job sharing had recently been introduced where I worked, but there was no right to it, luckily myself and a colleague managed to persuade our manager to allow us to job share. We were the first in our department. You can see why many women’s careers failed to progress, because for most, by the time you were able to work full-time again a long time had passed. Mat leave was 6 months or you lost the opportunity to return. If you didn’t return, you had to pay back some of your maternity pay. Clothes had to be smart, office like. No requirement for high heels. People were pulled up if they were inappropriately dressed. Dress down Friday, (smart jeans - no rips and not faded, and a nice top, still no trainers) was introduced in the late 90s.

Reading this thread has made me wonder how I ever managed to spend the working day, plus travel at either end, in court shoes and a pencil skirt!

I know, I used to walk the 1.5 miles to the station in heels. Now I need my trainers if I'll be doing anything more than door to car 😆

Yes you are right, I was working in a police station and worked with officers who were claiming it, that was pre Edmund Davis when police pay was increased.

Occasionally in the 80's I would rock up to work in the same clothes and make up I'd been out in the night before having stayed out all night and on about an hours sleep. Sometimes this would consist of white stilettos and a very short mini skirt.

I was telling young colleagues about dictating my letters for a typist who'd make 3 copies, using a typewriter and carbon paper. One to go out, one for the file, one for "circulation". A cardboard file that would be initialled by everyone in the office to say they'd seen it, in the same way we might cc an email now.

It really wasn't that long ago 🤣 What I will say is that the quality of communication sent out by large companies was much better when it was all typed by secretaries. Those women knew all there was to know about spelling, grammar and punctuation and rarely typed exactly what we dictated!

Also going to work straight from a club was not at all unusual 🤣

The only time I recall wearing heels and skirts was to very formal things

Like an interview - where we then got taken over the factory floor

Including a high level metal walkway - where you had to tiptoe wearing heels, holding the skirt close around your legs

It wasn't a factory job I had applied for

Yes it was Family Income Supplement I meant. You said refuges didn't start till the 1980s, I don't know about Lancashire but the fact is they did start in the early 70s. There was massive publicity about domestic abuse because of Erin Pizzey and the documentary about her work.

The Police response to domestic violence varied and to some extent it depended on who was answering the phone. A lot of officers got very cynical when women refused to give evidence and they felt their time was wasted on something that came to nothing. Other officers were very supportive, I actually worked in a police station for nearly 20 years and don't think you can judge all police actions and attitudes based on one phone call however bad that response was.

Oh that reminds me of an incident in the 1970s when I was working for the local council. Indignant young woman came back from lunch moaning about the queue in the post office. There were black people in front of her - oh the outrage. She finished by stating her father fought in WWII to keep this country white. I innocently asked her if he was in the German army, she nearly burst a blood vessel.

It's made me wonder about all the working mothers I knew in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

typewriters! 2 or 3 copies (carbon paper involved) that may then need to be changed due to a better idea, spelling error etc and redone. internal envelopes - no emails then. Address boxes on the outside that you crossed out so the envelope wouldnt go to the old address. Hi X, look at this and can you get back to me by Friday? Item sent back in an internal envelope this was in the NHS

Started work in 1982 as 16 year old at a factory of 300 people in a smallish town
I was treated like the kid sister. Anywhere I went I was aware someone knew me, in a good way.
Everyone was having affairs. It was rampant. From the MD and his secretary downwards.
The Reps of other companies gave away freebies with their company logos on like confetti.
Yes we drank at lunch, pub was almost nextdoor and on Fridays the bosses paid, sometimes we never even made it back to the office.

My first job with the police involved typing papers for court, old manual typewriter that you really had to bang away on as you needed two hard and 4 flimsy copies. I swear my poor arthritic hands are down to that stint particularly stints on murder incident rooms where we would be working 12 hr days 7 days a week. The money was worth it at the time, not so sure now.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten those envelopes. We used them in the police as well. By the time you got to the last box they were very tatty.

Internal mail. We had a basket by the door, and first thing in the morning and at lunch time someone would collect from a basket.
I used to grab them from any office and hand them to Reception.
We did the payroll cash, locked in a downstairs office, 300 people's wages. How did we never get robbed.?
I didn't even mention it till years later.

We had a month off in August when the whole factory shut down. Once we had £250,000 In cash to sort out.

I was a student nurse living in London at the start of the 80s. It was great fun music, fashion etc wise. I didn’t wear high heels for work 🤣 wore very strict flat black ‘duty shoes’. Female nurses wore a dress and (useless decorative) hat - make nurses more comfortable trousers and tunic. We could (and did) smoke in the staff cafeteria. Conditions in the NHS were dire even then and those not in the RCN but other unions took industrial action over conditions for patients. I remember not even having shrouds for deceased patients, and working way over my hours for no extra pay.

when I had my first child (1985) I gave up work and was a SAHP - this seemed normal. It wasn’t so much that we could afford one salary but we managed by going without stuff. There was lots of support for new mums - weekly drop in clinics, toddler groups, home visits from health visitor etc. I loved it and was very happy. There seemed less pressure than there is now, with all the clubs babies and toddlers can take.

@RoobarbAndMustard

No desk top PCs until the v late 80s.

I think it depended on the employer really. I started work in 1983 for a very small "old fashioned" firm (15 employees and two old bosses) and there was a Commodore PET in every room which was probably the first desktop "PC" type of computer. Staff had to share, we took turns to use it. I remember we did payroll, VAT returns and book-keeping on it as well as spreadsheets (Supercalc I think). Funnily enough, it wasn't used for work processing, the typists were still using electronic typewriters. There was a definite "push" by the owners to computerise as much as possible and despite them not using the computers themselves, they would reprimand staff who did something manually that could have been done on the computer, based on what they'd seen other staff use them for!

One of the things we use to do regularly were cash flow statements which were required to support client applications for bank loans, overdrafts etc. We used to do them by hand on paper, which involved lots of rubbing out and adding up by calculators to make them balance and then when adjustments were needed - they took hours (sometimes they took days). I was the first in our firm to do it on a computer spreadsheet and there was something magical about watching all the calculations change on the screen when I changed one cell, as a kind of Mexican wave. The other staff and the bosses were amazed at how much quicker they were to do by computer!

I moved to a bigger firm in 1986 and they had no computers at all which I found very surprising and disappointed. By the time I'd left in 1989, they had one "per branch", not per office, so you had 30/40 staff sharing a single computer! Really strange how a much smaller firm embraced them literally the moment they came out, yet bigger firms didn't.

I was a lot wiser when I moved to the next job in 1989 - as a qualified accountant applying for a "partner-designate" position. At the second interview, I asked about their computerisation progress, and I was ready to decline the job offer when they said they hadn't got any. But the senior partner recovered it well and told me one of my key roles would be to computerise them and said they wanted a PC on every desk, fully networked, aiming for a "paperless office" which was quite an aspiration back in 1989, and then told me their budget which was £50k! A huge sum at that time for what was a pretty small office. I readily agreed and spent the next four years revolutionising the place, and by the time I left in 1993, it was as "paperless" as it could be, in that everything internal was paperless, i.e. files, working papers, workings, etc - everything internal was on spreadsheets or databases - the only "paper" was external, i.e. letters to clients, accounts/tax returns to Inland Revenue/C&E, as there was no email nor online portals back then. We got to the stage when the filing room was just an archive - nothing new was ever put in there, and files were just used as reference for checking what happened in previous years etc. We didn't even keep copies of letters/accounts/returns that we'd sent out on paper - we had electronic versions so we didn't need to take and file copies!

Can't believe that was 30 years ago, and worked perfectly, yet even today, so many organisations still use paper, as least in part, for their records.

… the downside was AIDS, little understood at the time and so many suffered not just from the disease itself but from the prejudice, ignorance and unkindness of others.