The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-11-10
MAJOR|TYO IF WOMEN PASS EXAMINATION But Men Some How Get the
 Jobs FIGURES ARE INTERESTING Report of Civil Service Commission Shows 26,525 Took Examination,
 16,253 Passed and 78o5
 Got Jobs.
FIGURES ARE INTERESTING

WHSl1nRtOn, NONeIlDti -NoPSSihhl
 The civil service commission is Uncle Sam's employment agency, and like all such, the number of applications 1t re- ceives far exceeds the number of jobs Uncle Sam has to give. The evidence Of this is shown in the commissions report for the fiscal year of 1904, which Is the latest information available. During that period, 26625 men and women undertook the examination which Is a prerequisite to employment in the minor places of the government and while 16.25S of them passed, only 7s05. or less than half, of them got places.
 Of those who applied for jobs nearly 20,- 000 were men and 66G women. The women, though, showed higher percentage of efficiency, for 4540 of them, or slightly more than 70 per cent. passed the exam ination, while of the men 11,700. or less than SO per cent. showed themselves com petent Nevertheless circumstance which will perhaps grieve some advocates Of "equal rights" is that of the men who passed, Til of them got jobs, whereas of the women only 694 were successful. Expressed in percentage, about 70 per cent of the men who passed got jobs, but only little more than 15 per cent of the women. This, of course, Is proof of gross discrimination, but the proof is not need ed, for heads of departments admit frank ly that, as a rule, they prefer men as employees. But of course, this disparity is not due wholly to discrimination as be- tween the sexes. because the larger frac- ton of the jobs are of kinds which women are not fitted to hold.
 Not Easily Adaptable.
 For example. women are not easily adaptable to the duties of railway mail clerk, and of the 7S06 places which Uncle Sam had at his disposal in that year. lb'S were of that kind alone Neither would women make good Chinese inspectors. and though two applied for that service, and
 one of them demonstrated her mental fit- ness for the duties, all these vacancies were very properly given to men. They have applied in larger number for such places as computers in the coast and geodic sur vey, in the nautical almanac office. in the naval observatory and In the supervising architects office and, although number
 of them have proved their competence ac-
 cording to the tests prescribed by the
 government, none of them has succeeded
 in ensconcing herself in one of those po-
 sitions The places for which the women
 may apply with the most hope of success are such as that of matron in the Indian
 service, and as clerks and stenographers and typewriters
 admitted is small proportion of the number of those who call, for those liv- ing in the south and southwest the hope lessness of a government job is not SC great as these figures may suggest. This Is so because of the fact that the depart
 ment places in Washington are appor- toned among the states according to their populations and so long as q state lacks its quota of those places. its citizens who pass the examination have a preferential right to vacancies over those of states which may have their full quotas. South ern people do not seem to care so much for government places as those of other sections; or at last, approximately, they perform little of the routine labor needed to keep the government wheels moving. A compilation made not long ago as to the places in the consular service showed that a remarkably small number of them are filled by southern men. The disparity is not so great with respect of the posi- tions in the departments at Washington but 1t Is nevertheless sufficient to show that for some reason the people of the south have not so much regard for a government job as have the people of the north and east. It Is a rare thing for a northern or an eastern state to lack its l full quota of department places in Wash | ington; fin most cases. in fact, they have more than their quotas, as a result of the | failure of southern and western states | to supply claimants for all the places tc which they are entitled. For example | Texas Is entitled to 305 places. but it is | charged with only 279, or about 90 pei cent of it's quota. Arkansas is entitled tC | 13l, but has claimed only 115, or 97 pei cent; Mississippi to 155 with 132 claimed | Alabama. 1S3 with only 162 claimed Lou | isiana with 1Ss and only 102 claimed. Or | the thirty-nine places Indian Territory | Is entitled to it has claimed twenty-two
 while Oklahoma people have claimed only |