d the control of so large a number of Army Nurses,
needs women amongst its administrators.

The claim must also be made quite clearly, that in throwing open these
posts to women, the same method of recruiting must be employed as
for men, and the remuneration must be at the same rate. In asking for
these opportunities women are simply asking that the sex disability
which at present bars them from the majority of posts in the service,
may be removed. They do not seek admission in some special way, nor do
they wish to undercut men by accepting lower salaries. They ask that
the sex barrier may be removed in the case of both Class I. and Class
II. appointments--in other words, that these appointments may be open
to them on the same conditions as they are or may be open to men.

In the case of the majority of the appointments hitherto held by
women, some care has been taken to put them on a different footing
from those of men; in these instances it is not easy to compare the
work of women with that of men, or to urge the claim of women to
be paid at the same rate as men for work of equal value. There are,
however, some conspicuous instances--_e.g._, of the Factory Inspectors
and Inspectors of Schools--in which no such differentiation is
possible and in which the only reason for paying the women less than
the men seems to be that given by the ex-Permanent Secretary of the
Treasury in his evidence before the Royal Commission on the Civil
Service, "that women ought to be got as cheaply as possible, and that
if they can be got for less, they ought not to be paid the same as
men."

There seems some ground for believing that official opinion in
this matter is undergoing modification, since in the case of later
appointments--_e.g._, in the Labour Exchanges and in the National
Health Insurance Commission--the tendency has been to approximate the
salaries of women much more closely to those of men and even in some
instances to make them identical. It is therefore reasonable to hope
that the principle of equal pay for equal work will, before long, be
extended to appointments of longer standing, in which its application
would be no less just than in the case of new appointments.

II

THE LOWER GRADES AND THE PRESENT POSITION

So far as the position of its women workers is concerned, the State is
very far from being the model employer it sometimes professes to
be. When one considers the very wide disparity existing between