Does the British PA make a significant contribution to the national workforce? And if so - does the British PA get recognised for it?

The whole point of Secretary's Day/Week, when they were invented by Harry F. Klemfuss in 1952, was to encourage more women to become secretaries.

How well did he succeed? Actually - it's hard to say!

This year, more than ever, it is difficult to work out how many people work in the PA role. This is partly because of the rise of the self-employed "virtual PA" - the Federation of Small Businesses says that "every year more than 400,000 people make the brave decision to abandon the safety net of the monthly pay cheque", and clearly many PAs continue to take that route.

It is also partly because the UK's government statistics are way behind in meaningful employment data, and have failed to recognise the modern secretarial role.

So, how many PAs are "in employment"?

Of the four million businesses in Britain, the vast, vast majority (well over 99%) are made up of fewer than five people. They probably do not have a "secretary" as such.

Twelve million people work in 26,000 "small" companies, which employ 50-250 people each, and contribute half of our gross domestic product, worth about £500 billion. In each, we might expect to find an average of perhaps two to five PAs.

At the top of the employment pile, the number of "corporate" organisations is tiny, but their workforce is large, and they employ far more permanent and temporary people doing the PA job. In each corporate, there could be up to a hundred PAs, often more.

So, a completely unscientific estimate might be of 250,000 people doing the secretarial job in Britain.

But what does the Government say?

There is a British workforce of 23 million, of which 10.8 million are women. The nearest we can get to a secretarial figure is that the number of females aged between 16 and 74, doing "administrative and secretarial" work in England and Wales, is 2,458,000.

Frankly, we don't believe it - we think their definition is too loose, and it's even more doubtful when we look at the gender statistics. These suggest that 680,000 men are involved in "administrative and secretarial" work, which seems again to be badly defined. Another Government remark is that according to the British office for national statistics, "women clerical and secretarial employees in the United Kingdom outnumber men by nearly three to one...", which also seems to be way out.

We also have our doubts about where PAs are supposed to work. There are 380,000 in London, which seems reasonable - but what we find most entertaining in the UK Government statistics are the areas in which the PA must be most lonely. The outer Middlesborough and Chesterfield areas seem to have fewer secretaries than anywhere else, which is a surprise.

By contrast, the Americans are much more specific. There are just over four million doing the PA job in the USA, where the role is much better defined, and where the gender proportion also seems more realistic - in the States, only 1.4 per cent of secretaries are male.

Whatever our community figures, are British PAs well treated?

This is also extremely difficult - where surveys have been done, they are often so closely detailed across geographical and other data that it is very difficult to find any kind of general figure.

However, in a comparison of salaries by country, salaries in Australia vary widest of all, from around $20,000 AUD (£8,000) per annum for a junior position to well over $ 65,000 AUD (£26,000) for a senior position.

Three quarters of American secretaries come within the general salary band of £13,000-£26,000, and the average seems to work out at around £18-20,000.

In Britain, the most recent Gordon Yates survey showed an average for "senior level support" at around £20,000, and general office skills coming in at around £15,000. Adecco puts in very similar figures, at between £17,000 and £20,000.

Based on this, another fairly loose calculation suggests that the accumulated spending power of secretaries through their own personal pay is £39 billion, which at first seems extremely high - until you put it side by side with other social groups. The estimated spending power of the disabled community, for example, is fifty billion pounds, against which the entire secretarial working income looks a bit low.

So perhaps the British PA is indeed undervalued?

We found an interesting view in the Hudson report, which included the comment: "there is a real shortage of junior secretaries, team and banking secretaries and PAs with 2-3 years' solid experience. This is likely to have a knock-on effect with employers having to address the challenges of attraction, retention and development of their staff - despite this, clients are still reluctant to pay a premium for specialist skills such as shorthand and languages."

This year's Gordon Yates survey appeared to agree - although 82 per cent of secretaries think they are "highly valued", nearly half of them are not satisfied in their jobs.

OK, so flexible working deals and holiday entitlements are getting more generous - but are these really perks, or do they simply detract from the question of actual take-home pay?

It's fairly traditional for employers to talk a lot about the high job-satisfaction of doing a good PA job, and a cynical view would be that this is whitewash to take attention away from actual salary figures.

With this in mind, secretaries will certainly like a recent comment on this from another industry sector.

Just before this year's National Ideas Day, the operations director of the association which advises on staff suggestion schemes was looking at the general question of staff rewards. He remarked:

"Recognition and cash are always joint top favourites. There is a school of thought which says that acknowledgement alone is enough, and that financial reward is divisive... but funnily enough, this advice often comes from a consultant who has charged for it, and is often accepted by a chief executive who is quite happy to accept his annual bonus!"

Thanks to Kathie Thomas of A Clayton's Secretary for the Australian data, and David Bishop of the Federation of Small Business.