Price Waterhouse Ordered to Make Woman a Partner

After a seven-year battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and back, a federal judge here Monday ordered the giant accounting firm of Price Waterhouse to award a partnership to a District of Columbia woman it had rejected in a process that was biased against women.

The case is “the first in the country” in which a court has ordered a person to be made a partner in a professional firm as a remedy for such employment discrimination, according to Douglas B. Huron, an attorney for the woman, Ann B. Hopkins.

“She wanted to be a partner, was considered for partner and it was denied because of her sex,” said Huron. “Given that, the natural remedy was that she be made a partner unless there was some compelling reason why not and he couldn’t find any.”

U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell also ordered the firm to pay Hopkins some $350,000 to compensate for earnings she lost as a result of the illegal “sexual stereotyping.”

Hopkins, 46, is now a senior budget and policy review officer at the World Bank. She said Monday that she was “very pleased” with the ruling, and another of her attorneys, James H. Heller, said, “She’s prepared to go back” to Price Waterhouse.

Hopkins’ case, which has been in litigation since the mid-1980s, reached the Supreme Court last year. It resulted in an important ruling by the high court that employers in such cases may escape liability only by showing that there were other, legitimate reasons for denying the promotion.

However, the high court eased the standard for showing that there were legitimate reasons. It said that an employer need show only that “a preponderance of the evidence” supported its position--rather than “clear and convincing evidence”--in order to prevail.

The court had sent the case back to Gesell to be tried using the eased standard, and he found that the accounting firm did not pass.

“Price Waterhouse intentionally maintained a partnership evaluation system that permitted negative, sexually stereotyped comments (by partners) to influence partnership selection,” Gesell wrote.

Officials of the accounting firm said they would not comment until they reviewed Gesell’s ruling.

Hopkins went to work in Price Waterhouse’s consulting arm in 1978 and was proposed for partner in 1982. The following spring, she was told that she had been put on “hold.”