Women’s Job Opportunities Weighed, Found Wanting

Job discrimination based on sex and race is still widespread, if more covert, 21 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act--and won’t stop until every woman who is underemployed, underpaid or unemployed screams loud and clear.

That was the message from the conference on “Minority Women and Employment.” About 250 persons attended the day-long meeting last week at Cal State Los Angeles, where they were admonished to learn their rights and be prepared to fight. Jeannette Orlando, director of the Women’s Legal Clinic of Los Angeles, suggested a call to arms: “You can think what you want about me, but when I go home I want my paycheck.”

Keynoter Marguerite Archie-Hudson, director of California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s Los Angeles regional office and a trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District, said, “No woman needs to work under the terrible conditions of race and sex discrimination.”

Remember, Archie-Hudson said, “Our work has great value. We have an an absolute right to work and to be compensated fairly.”

Things have and haven’t changed since 1962, she noted, when, with a bachelor’s degree from Talladega, a small black college in Alabama, and a master’s in counseling from Harvard University, she reported to the University of Chicago to interview for a counseling job at the university’s academically prestigious laboratory high school.

The secretary’s “mouth flew open,” Archie-Hudson said, when she walked in. “They wanted somebody from Harvard . . . but they certainly did not expect me.” When a follow-up letter from the university explained that hiring her would be “a departure from racial policy,” she responded, “I’m afraid that’s your loss and not mine.”

She got the job and stayed for six years.

Today, she said, there are more “insidious” forms of discrimination against women of color in the workplace--lack of access to good child care, pay inequities, pigeonholing of women into low-paying, female-dominated jobs.

The audience included minority and other women, some men, a range of ages and job experience, some training for a first job, some in entry-level jobs, others preparing to re-enter the marketplace after years off for marriage and children.

Archie-Hudson told them she wanted to explode some “myths” about why women work: “Women in this country work to earn a living,” something minority women have been doing for a long time as “an integral part of the support system of their families.”

(Whereas in 1950 only a third of all women worked, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show 52.7% of the 16-and-over female population working today).

But even in times of national economic prosperity, said Archie-Hudson, there is a huge wage gap between working women and working men and “Hispanic females are more often discriminated against in pay than any other group.”

(A 1983 report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that 2.8 million women, 13% of those working full-time, earned $7,000 or less, compared with 4.4% of men.)

59 Cents on the Dollar

The median income for men is now $20,000, she noted; $12,000 for women. That’s 59 cents on the dollar for women, but for minority women, said Archie-Hudson, it’s even less: 54 cents for blacks, only 44 cents for Asian-Pacific women.

She pointed out that one in three working women is a head of household, many of them earning below the poverty level of $7,412; one-fourth of all working women have never been married and 20% are married to men earning less than $15,000 a year. Half of black working women are in clerical and service jobs, Archie-Hudson said, as are 75% of Latino women.

Even so, she said, “Most of the women in the work force are scared about their jobs, do not know where to go” and have no knowledge of networking with other women. “Many of us have to be prepared to sue our employers . . . we owe this to our children but, more importantly, we owe it to ourselves.”

“We’ve always had sexual harassment in the marketplace,” she said, but only now are women beginning to understand that they don’t have to put up with it, neither “leering and ogling” nor “direct sexual propositions as a condition of employment.”

Keep in mind, she said, that “an employer cannot ask you questions about your childbearing plans” or refuse to hire a woman because there is no woman’s bathroom or “force you to go on leave early because you’re pregnant.”

Each participant received a copy of “Women’s Rights,” a handbook compiled by the state attorney general’s office that covers such areas as employment, economic independence, health care and housing.

More Legislation Needed

But further legislation is needed, said Archie-Hudson, for the “eradication of discrimination.” Among important new legislation, she said, is a bill by Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), passed last year, that “pulls the cover off the comparable worth issue” by prohibiting an employer from requiring any employee to keep his or her wages secret.

Another important piece of legislation, she said, was a bill by Assemblywoman Gloria Molina (D-Los Angeles) that makes a person forced out of a job by sexual harassment eligible for unemployment benefits.

Now in committee in the state Senate is a bill that would establish a commission on pay equity to deal with the comparable worth issue by setting up an evaluation system for state civil service, University of California and California State University jobs and establishing a salary scale to correct inequities between female-dominated and male-dominated jobs.

The nitty-gritty issues--how to recognize discrimination and where to go for help--were addressed by attorney Carla Barbosa of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Wanda Kirby, district administrator of the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), and Theresa Fay Bustillos, a staff attorney and director of the employment project for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF).

Come forth with a grievance, Barbosa urged, “even if you have a doubt” that it’s sexual discrimination--but it must be filed within 180 days of the alleged act. The good news, she said, is that the employer will be notified within 10 days of the filing; the bad news is that EEOC’s backlog is such that an investigator cannot be assigned for six to 10 months.

Like the others who spoke, Barbosa urged workers not to be afraid to make charges, noting that federal law protects them from employer retaliation. “If you file a charge and funny business starts,” she advised, “come in and file another charge.”

“It’s not going to cost a penny” to make an official complaint either to EEOC or to her agency, said Kirby, who observed that while California has “one of the most aggressive civil rights laws in the country . . . harassment is occurring more and more.”

Prohibitive Prices

“Can you afford to hire an (private) attorney?” asked Bustillos. She spoke of retainers “that range all the way from $1,000 to $10,000” for job discrimination cases, hourly rates up to $175, consultation fees of $200.

Even so, she said, “If you can afford an attorney, you should see one early on,” before taking the case to EEOC or DFEH, both of which are overworked and understaffed.

Jeannette Orlando of the Women’s Legal Clinic, a private nonprofit membership organization that provides free and low-cost legal services, stressed the importance of being informed: “Nobody is going to tell you what your rights are unless you ask . . . you should be interviewing the employer.”

Complain if you feel it’s justified, she said, but remember “you have to substantiate what you’re saying. Take a pretty paranoid approach to the whole situation . . . write everything down.”

“Most cases are not litigated, they’re settled,” she said, usually without the employer having to acknowledge discrimination. Even so, said Orlando, there is a limited victory in making the employer and other employees “aware you were there.”

Civil rights is on the books, she said, but “a lot of people’s hearts aren’t in it . . . I truly believe if there is a woman in this room who has been working for seven years, she has experienced some form of job discrimination.”

The afternoon session, “Women Organized for Change,” was a panel discussion that included Carol Tucker, president of Black Women’s Network; Beatriz Olvera Stotzer of Comision Femenil, Bunny Hatcher of American Indian Women on the Move, Laura Esquivel of Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos and Charmeen Wing of Asian Pacific Women’s Network.

(The conference was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, the Women’s Resource Center at Cal State Los Angeles, MALDEF, the Asian Pacific Women’s Network, Black Women’s Network and Indian Women on the Move).

Women networking with women was the unifying theme, although panelists seemed to stray a bit from the subject of minority women in the workplace. Hatcher spoke of American Indians “staring down the barrel of cultural genocide” as they move into urban areas to get better jobs.

Hatcher added, “We don’t want to see our young women turn into apples, red on the outside, white on the inside . . . we want to see our young people succeed while still retaining the dignity of their distinct culture. They don’t have to sell out.

“It doesn’t mean we dislike whites. It means we want to hang onto our Indianness” while living in harmony with people of all colors.

A question from the audience was addressed to Esquivel: What is the status of women of color within the gay and lesbian community?

Replied Esquivel, “The gay and lesbian community is merely a microcosm of society at large. It’s dominated by Anglo males with all those inherent standards” and “being women, women of color and lesbians” is a threefold problem.

Another woman asked the panel, “How do you get women of color to file job discrimination suits?”

Stotzer said, “As Latinas, we’re very quiet and very submissive, supposedly” but a support organization provides one-on-one support for women who cannot turn to their families for support. Wing, too, spoke of the importance of one-on-one support for Asian-American women who, for cultural reasons, “may not be very aggressive” but can learn, with help, how “that can work to our advantage.”

A woman in the audience said that, during four years working in the CETA job training program, she identified women’s two major job problems as illiteracy and “tremendous isolation” and she now understood the importance of networking.

Tucker agreed: “I really felt the need (for support of other women) when I became a divorcee, mother of two children and primary support of my family.” Until then, she said, “I never considered myself a feminist.”

That support, she said, “gave me the courage to resign from a job I had for 14 years (teaching) with all the obstacles--I was a single black woman over 40.”

All good and well, said another woman, but what are you doing to reach the non-professional woman, who may be mired in the responsibilities of a low-paid job, a husband and children, or have no job and no idea how to get one?

“If you stay at home and wallow in whatever your misery is, don’t expect anything to come knock at your door,” said Tucker, but reach out and other women will “take your hand. . . .”