Sujet AD 2000

Durée : 3 heures

Coefficient : 2

Dictionnaire bilingue autorisé.

L'usage de la calculatrice est interdit.

More and more males are choosing to become secretaries. George Pendle meets one.

Once, in the not-too distant past, typing pools and office receptions were the sole domain of the female secretary. Indeed, in those golden days, the gender-defining adjective "female" would have been quite redundant: a secretary could only be a woman. Lovingly caricatured filing her nails, squawking into intercoms and being the object of her employer's wanton libido, the secretary's role was as well-defined as Elle Macpherson's thighs.

Then a change began to take hold. The stability of the pack was threatened as the male secretary entered the scene. "A man in a woman's job!" muttered the old guard, shaking their heads.

It was widely mooted that if a man had a personal secretary of the same sex then the secretary's duties would involve more than just typing letters and memos.

Fortunately these grim stereotypes have slowly been diffused as secretarial work has undergone an overhaul, both in whom it attracts and in its specifications.

"It is a job that lets you get your foot on the corporate ladder. It is much more of a legitimate option for graduates of both sexes," says Sarah Eldoori, PR manager at Office Angels. She states that 25 per cent of the workers on her books are men, 10 per cent up on a year ago (although this includes men in administrative and clerical roles). "People's attitudes are changing; maybe ten years ago male secretaries would face ridicule and discrimination, but not now".

One such case is Steven France, 25, who works as a personal secretary at the Central Office of Information. He had left university with only basic typing skills and big ideas. However, finding out that his big ideas had minimal financial potential, he stored them away and tried to get a temping job through the recruitment agency Adecco. "I pleaded with a lady there to let me try some audio typing and I spent a couple of days unpaid in their offices learning Powerpoint and Excel," he recalls. One of his first secretarial jobs was in a typing pool in the Public Trust Office working on "the correspondence of the dead" - wills. "I was the only man in the room with 13 60-year-old Nigerian women. They said I was the first man to come into their office for 15 years - they'd been working there all their lives and kept on asking me why I had become a secretary. In their days a man would never be a secretary. They all agreed it was a sign of the times".

It was an eye-opening experience for the mild-mannered Steven: "If I arrived at work in the morning with ruffled hair there would be a barrage of sexual innuendoes about my activities the night before. I enjoyed working there but I think it wouldn't be quite as humorous if it were a woman walking into a room of heckling men. Still, it gave me the typing skills to move into the world of the 'personal secretary'".

His present job at the COI is a little less daunting. Once again he is the only male secretary, but he finds it "bliss" compared to his previous employment. "I always feel as though I'm doing people a favour - there's no question of manly pride being dented. I do all the usual secretarial jobs - typing, looking after travel details, buying lunch and making tea and coffee. It's brilliant because it's not your life that you're looking after. You can drop it a six".

A recent survey by Keane Associates showed that male secretaries face resentment from female counterparts for using secretarial work as a springboard on to the managerial ladder. Although Steven can see his job evolving, he insists that it's not a fast track to management. "Office politics must be obeyed. However there comes a stage when a secretary goes from being passive to being active and thus becoming more like a PA". As for sexism, he laughs. "I've found that people feel slightly more comfortable with women secretaries. I think it throws them a little that I'm a man." Yet whether the secretarial future will be male is debatable. While recruitment agencies are banned from any form of gender discrimination, not all companies have registered the substantial rise in male hopefuls registered by Office Angels. Amanda Maine-Tucker, managing director of Maine-Tucker Recruitment Consultants, states that although the quaility of the actual job content has improved "immeasurably", there is still only a handful of men on he books who work purely as secretaries. Similarly, secretarial courses are "few and far between".

Male secretaries may no longer be unsusual but they still have a long way to go before they can be regarded as the norm.

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Vous vous appelez Alain RENAULT, vous avez 27 ans et vous habitez 19 Allée des Églantiers, 44000 NANTES.

Vous avez lu dans le numéro de lundi dernier du journal The Guardian une annonce pour le poste d'assistant de direction d'une société anglaise, "Coast-to-coast", spécialisée dans la distribution d'articles de sport de plein aire (outdoor activities) et dont le siège social est situé 23 Hollyfield Road, Newcastle-on-Tyne, NE 11 OSR.

Vous aimez votre travail actuel mais l'offre d'emploi que vous venez de lire vous séduit particulièrement car elle vous permet d'exercer votre métier dans un pays dont vous aimez le mode de vie et dans un secteur d'activité qui correspond à vos goûts puisque vous êtes amateur de sports de plein air (kayak, VTT, etc...)

Vous espérez que le fait que vous soyez un homme ne sera pas un obstacle : cela ne vous a jusqu'à présent jamais posé de problèmes : votre personnalité, votre adaptabilité, votre efficacité et votre sérieux ont su vous faire accepter par vos collègues féminines et apprécier par vos employeurs.

Vous espérez que votre lettre retiendra l'attention du directeur du personnel et attendez une réponse prochaine.

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