"For the hours I was there my hair was tied back, my hands were covered in ink and I was loving every minute of it," says Thompson, who has been at the firm for 15 years and is now senior production manager. "I was desperate to get on the presses, especially because my then-partner, who was a machine minder, bet me that a woman would never be hired as a press operator."

Such a bet is not surprising when you consider that Thompson and her partner only knew of five other women working on the presses in the mid-1990s. But is the situation any different today?

Certainly companies like Precision, which now has 39 women working within its 143-strong team in a multitude of roles, from print production assistants to client services directors, show that women have made gradual inroads into a range of roles within the industry. But, as anyone who has recently walked through a pressroom or attended an industry event will agree, the balance is still far from even.

Ina Cooke is sales director at Kall Kwik Plymouth and started out as a litho press operator 15 years ago. She says she has always enjoyed the hands-on nature of the work, having been known to surprise customers by being underneath a press with a spanner when they walk in. But Cooke is still a rare breed, she feels.

"I have met other female litho printers before but they are very few and far between," she says. "I’d say they probably still make up less than 10% of operators in the UK."

This kind of ratio can be found not just in the printroom, but upstairs in the boardroom too. When UK country manager at HP Nancy Janes decided to organise a Ladies Day at Ascot for women in managerial positions within print, she struggled to put a list together. In the end, the list consisted of 22 names, 12 of whom attended.

The lack of women in both areas is, of course, linked says Dani Novick, managing director at print and packaging recruitment specialist Mercury Search & Selection. A direct correlation can be drawn, she explains, between how many women work on the presses and how many in the industry’s boardrooms.

"In most cases, directors have worked their way up from the shopfloor," she says, "so if this isn’t attracting female representation it’s going to have longer-term consequences. The government’s proposals for women to make up 40% of PLC boards might be somewhat of a shock in the printing industry and nigh on impossible anytime soon."

Which begs the question of why still so few women are coming into print at entry level. Is there something about print that is inherently unappealing to the majority of women, or is the industry doing something to deter otherwise enthusiastic prospective female employees?

Gender divisions
Of course, not all areas of print are male dominated, with women traditionally featuring strongly on the administration and finishing side of things, and even more so in sales, customer service and graphic design roles, so that in some companies, there are as many if not more women than men in customer-facing and design positions. So why not production?

What Precision Printing and doubtless many other printing businesses can attest to is that stereotypes of gender – the mechanical world being a male domain and the creative world a female one – are very far from reality. However, that does not mean they don’t have an influence.

At Precision, Emma Thompson admits that women often start out in more typically ‘female’ roles, as receptionists for example, but then they do graduate to positions that demand a high level of understanding of and passion for production processes.

"Once women get into the printing world they become engrossed and really enjoy the hands-on work," she reports.

Others have sometimes found the environment less welcoming and the stereotypes more difficult to overcome. Tracy Dineen is regional business manager at Duplo and she says that the sexism that still pervades some printing environments can be a decisive factor in whether women feel comfortable pursuing a career in the industry. She says she has had first-hand experience of women leaving the industry because they were tired of hearing women talked about only in terms of their attractiveness and of hearing disparaging remarks about women’s inability to do production jobs.

"It’s certainly not the case that all or even most printers are sexist," she says "but it’s quite unbelievable the things that you still hear – even from senior people in the industry – in terms of talking about women in an objectifying way."

Although she isn’t offended by them, Ina Cooke agrees that comments about the inherent differences between men and women, with the emphasis often on women’s inferior aptitude for engineering and technical skills, do occur.

"I’m sure out of 10 women I’d probably be the only one not offended by some of the remarks," she says. "It’ll be things like men use this side of the brain, women use the other, so men are good at this specific skill and women shouldn’t be here."

She says she is regularly confronted by those who don’t expect her to be as knowledgeable about printing as a man.

"I do feel sometimes that you’ve got to be not just as good as the men but a little bit better," she reports. "You start proving yourself before someone even asks you to."

Weight of history
It’s not just the attitudes of the individuals that women have to overcome, but the weight of the historical definitions of gender that are behind those attitudes, and these definitions influence both men and women. Kathy Woodward, head of the BPIF, explains that this history means print is not even on the radar of many young women selecting a profession.

"Not only have women traditionally not gone into print production," she says," they haven’t traditionally gone into production in any industry. Men historically did pressroom work because heavy lifting, working with machines and getting messy was seen as unsuitable for women."

Convention, Woodward explains, can continue to dictate people’s subconscious decisions even when the rationale behind the tradition – that certain environments are unsuitable for women, for example – has long since been debunked.

This constitutes a vicious cycle, adds Thompson. Men frequently come into the industry following their father’s success in the field, whereas women have very few role models to make a career in print seem like a viable option.

Thankfully, there are signs that this is starting to change, with Woodward’s role at the BPIF a massive boost in this area, but there is still some distance to go.

What is needed to take things further is greater promotion of the industry to young women. Here, though, there is a real barrier of outmoded perceptions of the industry to overcome. Mercury’s Dani Novick explains that the image most people have of the printing industry is not a particularly attractive one.

"The general perception of print is a long way off reality," she says. "People think that this is an old-fashioned, dirty, noisy environment, which it’s not anymore."

It’s not just women that this deters, of course, print has long had a problem attracting new entrants. Perhaps, then, rather than specifically a gender issue, the lack of women in the industry is actually part of a wider recruitment issue the industry is facing.

Closed shop
Novick certainly takes this view. She explains that all individuals making a conscious decision about what industry to enter will be put off by the misconception that print is reliant upon dirty, outmoded technology and baffling terminology.

"Print has always been a very closed shop kind of industry with people accustomed to talking in technical jargon as a form of one-upmanship," says Novick. "What we need to do is start talking about how inspirational the results are, how cutting-edge the technology is and how, because many companies have diversified into cross-media to become marketing fulfilment organisations, the industry is very dynamic, very innovative and incredibly exciting. That should capture the imagination of the next generation with their connected and media mindsets."

More effectively selling how exciting the industry can be will ensure, says Novick, that print does not just attract those who have fallen into the trade due to it being a well trodden-route for people like them.

Attracting a diverse workforce to print, including different sorts of male individuals as well as female, is of course crucial in light of the kind of market that printers are now selling to. Managing director of Precision Printing Gary Peeling says that the comparatively high percentage of women in his company has had a very positive impact.

"If you’re going to sell to a diverse market place you need diversity in your company," he says. "There’s no point just hiring all of the same sort of people, especially as 80% of our buyers working within publishing and marketing are women."

Peeling is, of course, keen to point out that no company should operate a policy of positive discrimination when it comes to hiring women. While industry-wide incentives to promote a career in print are needed, recruitment should always operate on the basis of the best person for the job in question.

Merit rules
Nicola Bisset, managing director at Optimus, agrees. Despite being warned when she first started out in print that she would never get anywhere as a woman, she says that over-zealous encouragement of women to enter the world of print could be counterproductive.

"If you make a huge thing out of there not being enough women then this highlights that there appears to be a problem and actually introduces the idea to women that there might be a valid reason for not pursuing that career," she says. "It’s good to give encouragement to women that, yes, there are opportunities in the industry for them, but only in the same way that there are opportunities in any industry for anyone of any gender."

Getting more women into print and reaping the benefits of a more diverse workforce should, then, be a matter of better promoting the exciting opportunities that print offers to people from all walks of life. While sexist comments and attitudes are still regrettably a feature of some printing environments, most people would agree that the days of Page 3 calendars in pressrooms and women not being taken seriously by clients are a thing of the past, and will be even rarer the more diverse print’s workforce becomes.

Of course, the factors that inspire individuals to pursue a certain career will always be complicated and difficult to predict, particularly as they often respond to underlying, unexamined preconceptions about what people ‘like me’ do. What the industry might do to redress the gender balance is send out positive messages about what print can achieve, and so, in the words of Precision’s Emma Thompson, what "a great industry it is to be in, no matter who you are."

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WHAT THEY SAY

Alison Branch
Managing director, Park Communications
"I certainly don’t think print is a male-dominated industry because women aren’t interested or able to work in technical or software type industries, as there are a lot of women in science and scientific research. I think it’s a case of the industry not promoting itself well enough within schools and to graduates. If the industry raised its profile on the graduate roadshows I think that would attract greater diversity in general. Certainly I’ve never felt that there’s any prejudice in the industry and I actually feel that being a woman gives me an advantage because I’m different; so people are interested because I might have a slightly different take on things. I have though walked into situations with a male member of the sales team and somebody has automatically assumed that the man is the managing director. But that might happen no matter what industry I was in and, as far as I’m concerned, it gives me an advantage because they’re put on the back foot and are thinking ‘oh dear, how am I going to recover from this one!’"

Lucy Edwards
Assistant managing director, Howard Hunt Group
"I haven’t felt restricted because of my gender at all, since I have been part of the industry. I think print is a very different business to the one I joined nine years ago; it used to be straight manufacturing, but now it is much more of a service industry and that has provided ways in for women in customer service, data and digital marketing positions, which are traditionally much less male dominated. This obviously has a knock-on effect as printers are more used to seeing women in the workplace. Not that I encountered any sexism before, but I just think it is now much more common to see women at a printers and that can only serve to encourage more to join. This company has been brilliant and I have always been judged on my abilities and treated as an equal rather than being judged as a female. I think that every progressive print company would be the same – especially if they are looking to expand into the new areas where print is headed, such as marketing and data."

Blue Walmsley
Production supervisor, RWR Digital
"I came into print when I left college not knowing what I wanted to do and my dad recommended I come and work for his company. So really I just got thrown into it and ended up really enjoying it. It wasn’t a conscious choice and I’m sure I wouldn’t have ever decided to take this route if my dad hadn’t been in the industry. There are seven women in total at RWR, but they work in finishing and as receptionists; there are no other women in production. When I first started out a couple of years ago at 18, I did feel a bit intimidated by everyone being male and a lot older than me. I went from working in a shoe shop with 10 girls all of about my age, into a factory with men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Similarly when I did a print course at Leeds City College I felt a bit nervous at first about being the only girl out of 20, but it doesn’t bother me now. I do however encounter the occasional person on the phone saying, ‘can I speak to one of the guys that knows about this,’ when it’s actually something I am more than capable of helping them with."