Women who are apparently
careless and inattentive when they have to distribute their attention
over a number of operations do high-class work when they are engaged
in a single activity; and in other cases the opposite is reported.
I may mention a few concrete chance illustrations. In a pencil factory
the women in one department have to grasp with one movement a dozen
pencils, no more and no less. Some learn this at once without effort,
and they earn high wages; others never can learn it in spite of
repeated trials. If those who fail in this department are transferred,
for instance, to the department where the gold-leaf is most carefully
to be applied to the pencils before stamping, very often they show
great fitness in spite of the extreme exactitude needed for this work.
To show how often activities which appear extremely similar may demand
different individuals, if the work is based on different psychical
functions, I may refer to a report from one of the largest
establishments in the country. In the accounting department a large
number of girls are occupied with looking over hundreds of thousands
of slips from which the weekly pay-list is compiled. Each slip
contains six figures and small groups of twenty slips have to be
looked through to see whether those six figures on each correspond.
With moistened forefinger they turn up the slips one by one in much
the same manner that a bank clerk counts money.
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