, there are13 women in congress, several women ministers, a woman attorney general, and all three of the Congressional Steering Committee members are women. (Mandel-Campbell, p. 13A). Women are needed in the workplace, because they offer and have a realistic, common sense approach to the needs of modern America. The changes occurring in the workplace present several sub-trends. One of the most significant is that women are returning to it in large numbers. I use the term returning rather than entering because women comprised a major factor in the workforce during World War II, but was forced out by men returning from the war. Jamieson and O’Mara (1991) project that approximately 50% of the workforce will be comprised of women by the year 2000. Wives came to the rescue of the family in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though male earnings dropped substantially for all but the top 20% of male workers, real household incomes fell only marginally for the bottom 60%, and increased for the top 40%. One third of this increase was a result of a rise in female real annual earnings; however, two-thirds was due to women working more hours per year. Unfortunately, most income earners in the family are now working as many hours as they can. The reentrance of women into the workforce occurred during the transition from the industrial to the information age. To a large extent, women entering the workplace are immediately faced with the issue of how to adapt to the new workplace environment. As we look at the characteristics of organizations in the industrial-age (e.g., bureaucratic structure, focus on rank and control, mechanistic and impersonal) versus the characteristics of organizations in the information-age (e.g., network structure, focus on connections and knowledge exchange, holistic and personal), I do not think it takes too big a stretch to re-label these columns male and female, masculine and feminine, or at a minimum, masculine...
