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The State - News from May 16, 1985

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A female student who wrote and publicized a poem accusing a former school counselor of sexism is fighting libel and slander charges in court. Sharon Anderson, 41, pleaded no contest in April to disturbing the peace in exchange for dismissal of the charges. She said she will change her plea to not guilty at a hearing in Oroville Justice Court. Anderson, an engineering student at California State University, Chico, accused former Butte College counselor Frank Florio of sexism for advising women against entering the male-dominated engineering field. She said Florio also tried to “pat” her during a counseling session at the two-year school in 1979. Still seething about the incident, she wrote a poem in January, recited it to Florio and mailed a copy to Florio’s supervisor. The poem says, in part: “ ‘Go home and make babies,’ he tells me instead. ‘And girls can’t be engineers, it ruins them in bed.’ ” Florio denies her charges.

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