To a certain extent, I think the third, the skills gap, was the most significant of my findings, for it augurs severe unemployment, as the skill needs at the level of work where employment opportunities are growing with the technology increasingly exceed the scope of most industrial retraining programs, to say nothing of the native skills of current support staff being displaced by automation. While I found clear-cut instances of people being displaced by automated systems, I found little evidence of layoffs - the traditional signal of employment disaster. Instead, I found merely a noiseless drying up of employment opportunities. Job vacancies are going unfilled; full-time positions are being replaced by part-time positions; and workloads are being greatly increased, but with no increase in staff, except in the professional, specialist ranks, and even there, usually at the expense of support staff, for the women are not being given the opportunity to move up from positions rendered redundant by automation into the new computer-enhanced positions. They're simply being abandoned through attrition. At the rate women are being left behind by the computer revolution, I concluded in Women and the Chip, by 1990, up to 1 million women in Canada could be unemployed.

Let me now turn to the other side of the employment question, the new work. Rather than break the thread of the kind of work I've been talking about all along and discussing the work associated with computer professionals, I'll talk about how computerization is transforming middle management. As you know, traditional middle management is concerned with supervision and administration. As you might not know, a lot of this work is being automated.

Traditional supervisory work is being eroded through such computer "aids" as computer monitoring and computer-aided instruction, which is becoming very popular for industrial training. To illustrate how traditional administration work is being automated, let me go back to the "office of the future" description I gave earlier. Once information has been put into an electronic information system, it becomes instantly accessible to anyone, anywhere else in the system. Hence, if you're an employment counsellor in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and want to know how many unemployed dental assistants there are, you can get the most up-to-the-minute information just by keying in the command for the information. And if you want a percentage distribution according to province, you can get that instantly as well. In other words, the electronic system automates the entire activity of centralized record keeping and report writing. Besides that work being eclipsed by the computer software, the administrative work associated with setting up and running the reporting and recording procedures is eliminated as well.

The middle manager of the future is emerging as a computer-literate professional who administers the resources of electronic information systems. The pattern in Canadian industry is to hire a systems analyst, or an engineer, and parachute her (unfortunately, it's mostly him) into the middle-management ranks. Of course, such an approach contributes to the problem that industry's most worried about - namely, a skills-shortage problem - as the capacity of Canadian universities to turn out these computer professionals is overtaxed. It also leads to the problem I, and most other women are worried about - namely, women being left behind, either still in the ranks of the support staff, or, having finally gained the middle-management stepping stone out of the clerical ranks, left to wither on the vine of the increasingly redundant occupations in traditional administration.

A solution that would solve both problems and would address the need to which I referred earlier - namely, the need to accommodate ongoing change - is what some people call job redesign, or occupational bridging. The idea is to allow all jobs to evolve, to allow for the redundancy of job functions, rather than the redundancy of people. In practical terms, this would require a combination of education, training and job redesign or work reorganization. It could be packaged as apprenticeship programs, co-op work-study programs, or even affirmative-action programs.