"‘By Some Strange Alchemy’: Mechanisation and the Marriage Bar in British Banking, c. 1920-1960"

The trigger for mechanisation and feminisation was the rapid rise in the volumes of transactions and processing costs. Gender was explicit in these calculations: savings were calculated in terms of men displaced minus the cost of females hired form mechanised tasks. Mechanisation was economically viable if and only if, this technology was feminised. This paper will show there is compelling archival evidence that banks were adopting an increasingly strategic and calculated approach to staffing. This did not, however, imply any relaxation of the marriage bar. By the mid-1930s, growing concerns over bottlenecks in banking careers – and some limited gains by the banking unions – led some banks to consider their long-term staffing policy. This lead to an increase the absolute and relative numbers of women staff. First, females were cheap, not least because more than 75% left employment before they were thirty. This also reduced their pension costs. Second, females had proved themselves efficient ‘in a very great deal of routine clerical work’ and in areas such as shorthand typing and mechanical book-keeping they were at least the equal of men. A risk of mechanisation was that male juvenile recruitment almost halted in 1931-32 which jeopardised the long-run supply of ‘trained men of a certain “weight”’. On the other hand, bank executives projected that the long run effects of feminisation and mechanisation would be to improve male career prospects. Inter-war mechanisation was contingent upon hiring young unmarried female labour. The marriage bar was then created in British banking to ensure a high churn of young female labour, reduce transaction costs so that the branch network could be expanded. The integrity of the male banking career was protected by this gendered mechanisation.