54
EMPLOYMENT PSYCHOLOGY
that the existence of these three functions should soon
become apparent. The first experiment was concerned
with inspectors, and, although it was originally confined
to one shop only, its scope rapidly extended oyer a group
of other shops which were devoted entirely to inspection
of a very similar nature. The present experiment was
made in the field of assembling and consists of an attempt
to discover tests bringing out the essential qualities which
go to make a successful assembler.
The assembling with which this experiment was con
cerned was that of small gun parts. The particular in
fluence which led up to the experiment was the belief that
a large amount of the assembling hitherto done by men
could be done just as well by women. This was at the
time when the substitution of women for men had become
a critical matter in the war industries. The experimenter
found that this opinion had already been conceived and
worked out by the general foreman of the assembling shops.
This foreman had made a careful analysis of the work and
had made up a program according to which women were
to be introduced. However, the question which still re
mained to be answered was: What kind of girls will be
able to do this work and how are they to be obtained?
This was the question which the psychologist was particu
larly anxious to answer.
Since there were no girls doing this work at the time it
was impossible to do what had been done in the previous
experiment; that is, try out a set of tests on a group of
workers in order to discover certain significant tests. If
a sufficiently large group of men had been doing this work,
it might have been possible to try tests out on them. Then,
if any tests were discovered to have a high correlation,
they could be given to girl applicants on the assumption