Today is Administrative Professionals Day, and while the existence of this hyper-specific honorary day goes by every year unnoticed by many, there are those who are aware of it. And some of them post earnestly on social media or grab flowers and donuts for their office personnel on the Wednesday of the last full week in April every year. But others really disdain it.
Let’s talk about why you might want to quit celebrating it altogether.
What is the history of Administrative Professionals Day?
Like so many of our holidays, this one has a long history that has been lost in time. Back in 1942, the National Secretaries Association was founded to highlight and support administrative personnel. There was a shortage of people in the industry at the time, due in part to a birthrate decline during the Great Depression and the post-war business boom. The NSA went through a few name changes, first to Professional Secretaries International in the early 1980s, then to the International Association of Administrative Professionals in 1998.
NSA president Mary Barrett and a few other professionals were instrumental in creating the holiday, which even has a registered trademark. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Charles W. Sawyer first proclaimed National Secretaries Week in June of 1952 and the first National Secretaries’ Day took place on June 4 of that year, sponsored by the NSA.
Like the NSA, the holiday itself went through some identity shifts. In 1955, the observance of the week was moved to the last week of April, and Wednesday became Administrative Professionals Day. In 1981, the same year the NSA changed its name the first time, the week became Professional Secretaries Week. In 2000, it switched to Administrative Professionals Week.
Basically, during an era when fewer people were entering administrative roles, their champions wanted to set aside some time to thank the professionals in the field for all they do to keep businesses running smoothly and entice others to join their ranks. It’s pretty simple stuff—or at least, it was back then.
Who likes this holiday?
Administrative Professionals Day has been trending on Twitter as bosses and employees fete the administrators in their offices. Certainly, amid the work-from-home shift of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw how vital the people who keep operations up and running really are. There are celebratory gifs from administrative professionals and kind messages from business accounts that honor office staffers by name, which is all very nice.
Carly Wilson, lead marketing strategist at Planet Depos, published a list of ways bosses can celebrate their admins this year. From coffee to letting them take the day off, she advocates for a variety of methods to show secretaries and their peers how valued they really are.
OK, so who could be against Administrative Professionals Day?
It won’t surprise you to learn that, like everything else, something as innocuous-seeming as a day to honor office personnel is actually quite divisive. Just as there are people celebrating with breakroom treats and well-meaning posts, there are people who are calling for an end to the holiday.
In 2011, Lisa Wade, a sociologist and associate professor at Tulane University, summed up the criticism like this in the Society Pages: “Secretary’s Day is a rather recent faux-holiday that conveniently (for florists, card makers, and candy and cookie bakers) falls between Easter and Mother’s day and mostly serves to bolster capitalist cashflow. Need a product to show your appreciation? We’ve got ’em! From cakes to gift baskets to greeting cards.”
She called the holiday “disingenuous” because it reveals how devalued administrative assistants are every other day of the year. Because of that, it “actually exposes that which it claims to dissolve.” Harsh.
In 2014, the Produce News put out a call to readers in the floral industry, saying the holiday “may just be a sleeping giant” for flower sales and advising preemptive advertising, customer service, visual merchandising, and the distribution of quality products to capitalize on this sales boom between Valentine’s and Mothers’ Days. That messaging certainly plays into the criticism from non-floral industry workers that this holiday is just another example of capitalist money-grabbing and virtue-signaling in the interest of making a buck.
Alison Green, who writes about workplace issues, called the day “patronizing and demeaning” in a 2015 column for U.S. News & World Report, going as far as to say that it adds to the problem of under-appreciation for administrative professionals “by further ghettoizing the job and pigeonholing admins into a different category from everyone else.”
The criticisms are fair. It can be simultaneously true that this day is a capitalist scam that others our administrative professionals while also giving us an opportunity to celebrate them. There is a simple solution here: Appreciate your secretaries, coordinators, assistants, coding managers, and more every day. Say “thanks” often. Bring them a little snack on random days, not just on days that pop up in your iCal reminding you that you should. You don’t need a designated holiday to be decent, so don’t wait for one.