AIDS TO PRODUCTION Available to Purchase

THERE appears in our “Workshop and Production Section” this month a page of photographs illustrating the type of work on which women are being employed at the works of the Westland Aircraft Company. There is, of course, in these days nothing particularly unusual in this, which is a regular feature of all engineering factories—not the aircraft industry alone. Owing in part to political propaganda, no doubt, there is a good deal of nonsense being published on this subject, as if the employment of women on engineering operations was a novel, and even an astonishing, feature of this War. This is, in fact, by no means the case, as those who remember conditions in the Four Years' War are well aware. Women then showed themselves perfectly capable of learning and efficiently carrying out the simpler machining operations, for instance, and were even employed on some much more complicated work involving considerable skill and precision. There is no reason whatever that we can see why women should not be, after adequate training, just as good as men in, for example, inspection work, however delicate in nature.