When Precision Printing announced a new pressroom assistant would be joining the team, a certain kind of person was expected to walk through the door, roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the messy business of mixing and measuring inks and scrubbing plates clean. That person did not, in the team's mind's eye, sport long, bright blonde hair, painted nails, immaculate make-up and six-inch wedge heels. But that, in the words of their new colleague Emma Thompson, "is what they got."
"For the hours I was there my hair was tied back, my hands were covered in ink and I was loving every minute of it," says Thompson, who has been at the firm for 15 years and is now senior production manager. "I was desperate to get on the presses, especially because my then-partner, who was a machine minder, bet me that a woman would never be hired as a press operator."
Such a bet is not surprising when you consider that Thompson and her partner only knew of five other women working on the presses in the mid-1990s. But is the situation any different today?
Certainly companies like Precision, which now has 39 women working within its 143-strong team in a multitude of roles, from print production assistants to client services directors, show that women have made gradual inroads into a range of roles within the industry. But, as anyone who has recently walked through a pressroom or attended an industry event will agree, the balance is still far from even.
Ina Cooke is sales director at Kall Kwik Plymouth and started out as a litho press operator 15 years ago. She says she has always enjoyed the hands-on nature of the work, having been known to surprise customers by being underneath a press with a spanner when they walk in. But Cooke is still a rare breed, she feels.
"I have met other female litho printers before but they are very few and far between," she says. "I’d say they probably still make up less than 10% of operators in the UK."
This kind of ratio can be found not just in the printroom, but upstairs in the boardroom too. When UK country manager at HP Nancy Janes decided to organise a Ladies Day at Ascot for women in managerial positions within print, she struggled to put a list together. In the end, the list consisted of 22 names, 12 of whom attended.
The lack of women in both areas is, of course, linked says Dani Novick, managing director at print and packaging recruitment specialist Mercury Search & Selection. A direct correlation can be drawn, she explains, between how many women work on the presses and how many in the industry’s boardrooms.
"In most cases, directors have worked their way up from the shopfloor," she says, "so if this isn’t attracting female representation it’s going to have longer-term consequences. The government’s proposals for women to make up 40% of PLC boards might be somewhat of a shock in the printing industry and nigh on impossible anytime soon."
Which begs the question of why still so few women are coming into print at entry level. Is there something about print that is inherently unappealing to the majority of women, or is the industry doing something to deter otherwise enthusiastic prospective female employees?
Gender divisions
Of course, not all areas of print are male dominated, with women traditionally featuring strongly on the administration and finishing side of things, and even more so in sales, customer service and graphic design roles, so that in some companies, there are as many if not more women than men in customer-facing and design positions. So why not production?
What Precision Printing and doubtless many other printing businesses can attest to is that stereotypes of gender – the mechanical world being a male domain and the creative world a female one – are very far from reality. However, that does not mean they don’t have an influence.
At Precision, Emma Thompson admits that women often start out in more typically ‘female’ roles, as receptionists for example, but then they do graduate to positions that demand a high level of understanding of and passion for production processes.
"Once women get into the printing world they become engrossed and really enjoy the hands-on work," she reports.
Others have sometimes found the environment less welcoming and the stereotypes more difficult to overcome. Tracy Dineen is regional business manager at Duplo and she says that the sexism that still pervades some printing environments can be a decisive factor in whether women feel comfortable pursuing a career in the industry. She says she has had first-hand experience of women leaving the industry because they were tired of hearing women talked about only in terms of their attractiveness and of hearing disparaging remarks about women’s inability to do production jobs.
"It’s certainly not the case that all or even most printers are sexist," she says "but it’s quite unbelievable the things that you still hear – even from senior people in the industry – in terms of talking about women in an objectifying way."
Although she isn’t offended by them, Ina Cooke agrees that comments about the inherent differences between men and women, with the emphasis often on women’s inferior aptitude for engineering and technical skills, do occur.
"I’m sure out of 10 women I’d probably be the only one not offended by some of the remarks," she says. "It’ll be things like men use this side of the brain, women use the other, so men are good at this specific skill and women shouldn’t be here."
She says she is regularly confronted by those who don’t expect her to be as knowledgeable about printing as a man.
"I do feel sometimes that you’ve got to be not just as good as the men but a little bit better," she reports. "You start proving yourself before someone even asks you to."