Women, age, and the managerial career in postwar Britain: Exploring the roots of the barriers to women’s opportunities in management

Abstract

This essay explores how the assumption that hierarchical position should be linked to a position-holder’s age acted as a barrier to women advancing into management positions. The close and unquestioned association between an individual’s age and what was considered an appropriate place on a bureaucratic hierarchy is one of the less often acknowledged barriers to women’s upward mobility. The study focuses on Britain in the years following the Second World War, because the increased participation of women in the workforce during the war had engendered optimism about women’s opportunities for long-term gains and advancement. Many women came out of the Second World War with a high degree of organizational capital that should have seen them advance into managerial positions. But as this study shows, through evidence gathered from archival as well as published historical documents, in the reality of the postwar world being the wrong age for the job constituted a significant barrier to women’s advancement.