nd still better, to persuade colleges and schools to modify
curricula to meet the changed demands.

Women are often passed over because they are not prepared.

The Bureaus have found the demand for women in industrial chemistry and
physics, for instance, to be greater than the supply because the
graduates of women's colleges have not been carried far enough in
mathematics, and in chemistry have been kept too much to theoretical
text-book work. For example, the head of a certain industry was willing
to give the position of chemist at his works to a woman. He needed some
one to suggest changes in process from time to time, and to watch waste.
He set down eight simple problems such as might arise any day in his
factory for the candidates to answer. Some of the women, all college
graduates, who had specialized in chemistry, could not answer a single
problem, and none showed that grip of the science which would enable
them to give other than rule of thumb solutions. He engaged a man.

In answering the questionnaire which the New York Bureau of Occupations
sent to one hundred and twenty-five industrial plants, the manager in
almost every case replied, in regard to the possibility of employing
women in such positions as research or control chemists, that applicants
were "badly prepared." As hand workers, too, women are handicapped by
lack of knowledge of machinery. In this tool age, high school girls are
cut off from technical education, although they are destined to carry on
in large measure our skilled trades. I am told that in Germany many
factories had to close because only women were available as managers,
and they had not been fitted by business and technical schools for
the task.

If women individually are looking for a soft place, if they are afraid,
as one manager expressed it, "to put on overalls and go into a vat,"
even when their country is so in need of their service, it is futile for
them to ask collectively for equal opportunity and equal pay; if they
individually fail to prepare as for a life work, regarding themselves as
but temporarily in business or a profession, their collective demand
upon the world for a fair field and no favor will be as ineffective as
illogical.

The doors stand wide open. It rests with women themselves as to whether
they shall enter in.

To the steady appeals of the employment bureaus, backed by the stern
facts of life, the colleges are yielding. On examination I found that
curr