The days of “take a note, Miss Jones” are long gone. Grant Thornton, one of the UK’s biggest accountancy groups, has axed an estimated 100 UK-based secretaries, outsourcing the roles to India. The stereotype will not be missed, but the job itself might be.
Once an office fixture, secretaries have been on the decline since the early 1990s, supplanted by technology and cheaper overseas labour. Numbers in the US have halved over the period, on government data, even as the ranks of managers quadrupled and chief executives grew 10-fold.
Nor is it just the western world. Even Japan’s multitudes of office ladies — a role encompassing everything from making tea to negotiating deals while bosses were on a smoking break that, yes, was most often performed by women — have rapidly dwindled.