Women are teachable

Yeah, not like men who you can just dump without notice in a dark, dirty and unsafe work environment for 12-hours shifts without breaks. You can just intall a guy in front of a dangerous machine and let him figure out by himself what the job is, with a little help from a supervisor yelling at him for each tiny mistake, but women are delicate purty flowers!

It was my experience, in the 1970s-80s, in both factories and machine shops, that, in general, most women are more comfortable with detailed explanations and close supervision at first while most men feel you're being condescending if you show them much more than how to turn the machine on and off, and they don't like someone checking on them constantly.

You have to remember that at the time of that booklet, industry was transitioning from a virtual apprentice system (hire a guy at the lowest level, let him learn by watching/helping other people do their jobs, and move him up as he acquires skills) to walk-in, front-line workers, most of whom had never even been in a factory before, had no mechanical training or experience, and were used to having some measure of control over how/when they performed their varied tasks (essentially moving them down from self-sufficient to being a drone).

and please notice the "no horseplay or 'kidding'; she may resent it" - now more than ever, that is darn good advice for a supervisor!

Women in a large scale workplace were still something of a novelty at the time of this printing even though the nation was still building to full speed for the war effort. Much of the advice is really a restatement of "Do unto others...", however the reasoning is sound and I wonder how much credit the author received.

For a light look at the times, I'd recommend a movie titled "Swing Shift" with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as the lead characters. It isn't an historic record movie but does capture some of the background of the war effort.

this is good advice, regardless of gender!

worth presenting to your human resources department.

@gary ray -- A lot of them are now required by law, either OSHA regs or state employment laws. All of them are 'strongly suggested' by company lawyers to prevent lawsuits.

In the mid-80s, one small factory was fined over a thousand dollars because the employee restrooms didn't meet health department standards for cleanliness and for being one toilet short of the quota for the number of employees.