Where Have All the Secretaries Gone?

“He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they’re looking for something between a mother and a waitress,” says office manager Joan Holloway to new recruit Peggy Olson in Season One of Mad Men. The show, which returns to AMC for its sixth season on April 7, revels in the ghosts of offices past: drinking on the job, racist jokes, typewriters. Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency is built around a charmingly retro (if gallingly sexist) division of labor. Secretaries screen calls, arrange meetings, manage calendars—and often make great wives—allowing their bosses to create life-changing ad campaigns and go out for boozy client lunches. Tellingly, everyone’s desk looks fastidiously neat. Those were the days.

Fifty years later, as a result of changing technology and cost-cutting, assistants are disappearing from corporate life, along with their cousins, executive assistants, office managers, and clerks. “There’s absolutely no question that fewer people have secretaries now,” says Pat Cook, a corporate recruiter who places executives at blue chip companies. “People at the C level, the chief marketing level, and so on, probably still do have an assistant. But when you get below that level, it’s free fall.” This does reduce head count, but, she adds, “everybody agrees that they could be so much more productive if they did have an assistant.”