I was watching Goldfinger last night, and I noticed something strange (and this pretty much applies to the rest of the older James Bond movies as well). There was a scene at the beginning when Goldfinger was cheating at cards and Bond needed to get into his hotel room to stop him. He pretty much charmed the maid into letting him into the room. Well, sort of. He grabbed the key that was tethered to her waist, and he let himself in. Then, he sweet-talked her into not objecting too strongly or calling security or anything like that. The maid, of course, was a young and very attractive woman, and the whole scene got me thinking.

When you hear the phrase “Bond girls,” you usually think of Honey Rider or Pussy Galore, but in those early Bond movies pretty much every woman Bond encounters, particularly those with jobs, are hot younger women, with very few exceptions. The woman at the hotel desk. A maid. Flight attendants. Grocery store clerks. Bartenders. In the old Bond movies, they’re all ridiculously hot and twenty-something. So, my question is this: how much of this is just because it’s a movie, and how much of it was the 1960’s? I wasn’t alive back then, but the whole concept of women with careers was somewhat new at the time. Because of that, did the female workforce trend towards younger women? I would guess that older women may have resisted the idea of working, so jobs that were given to women were probably filled by younger women. But was it really as pronounced as it appeared in the movies?

These days, you don’t see this as noticeably. I think I may have seen one flight attendant under 40 in the last twenty flights I’ve taken, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a hot hotel maid, not even in Las Vegas. In general, the female workforce is just the mix you’d expect (younger women in entry-level positions and older ones in more senior ones). But back in the 60’s, was there some kind of young hot workforce thing going on? Was this an unintended side-effect of feminism (a brief period of a youthful female workforce before it got “normalized”)? Or was it just in the movies?