Women to Get $508 Million for Job Bias by U.S. Agency

The federal government agreed Wednesday to a record $508-million settlement of a sex discrimination lawsuit brought more than two decades ago by 1,100 women who were rejected for jobs at the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency.

The settlement, hailed by attorneys on both sides, is the largest in U.S. history for a sexual discrimination complaint and does not include nearly $23 million in back pay, interest and retirement benefits to be paid to some of the plaintiffs.

Washington lawyers Bruce A. Fredrickson and Susan Brackshaw, who represented the plaintiffs, said trial evidence revealed that the USIA and its subsidiary, the Voice of America, regularly manipulated the hiring process to exclude women.

U.S. Atty. Wilma A. Lewis of the District of Columbia called it “an equitable and fair resolution” negotiated by the government “after exhausting our legal remedies” since the suit was filed in 1977.

The women, many of whom were experienced broadcasters with graduate degrees, will receive an average settlement of $500,000. U.S. District Judge James Robertson is expected to approve the agreement, clearing the way for plaintiffs to receive lump-sum payments.

Officials were uncertain whether a special appropriation would have to be sought from Congress. Besides payments to plaintiffs, the government will have to pay an additional $12 million in fees to their lawyers.

Women in the class-action suit had applied for government jobs as international radio broadcasters, writers, editors, production specialists and electronic technicians from 1974 to 1984.

The suit began 23 years ago when Carolee Brady Hartman, then 29, accused the USIA, which disseminated U.S. government news and information overseas, of turning her down for a writer’s job because of her gender.

“The man who was interviewing me said he was not going to hire me because I was a woman,” said Brady, now a social worker living in San Francisco. “At the time, I just didn’t know how to respond. Now I have a way of responding. This is the victory we all celebrate today.”

The lawsuit in which other women joined was decided in favor of the plaintiffs in 1984 by the late U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey. But the government challenged Richey’s ruling with two appeals to higher courts and took the case as far as the Supreme Court, which declined to reverse Richey’s ruling.

The government then insisted on adjudicating claims on a case-by-case basis, a time-consuming process in which a special master ultimately found in favor of claimants in 46 of 48 cases he heard, with many of those awards amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those 46 women will share in Wednesday’s settlement.

Several of the plaintiffs have died since the case was filed. In those instances, settlements will go to survivors.

If the government had not agreed to a final settlement, the case-by-case hearings before the special master, George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg, might have lasted until the year 2017, lawyers said.

Dona DeSanctis, a former broadcaster for Vatican Radio in Rome who was rejected for employment by USIA in favor of a man with no journalism experience, said of the settlement: “The Justice Department has lived up to its name and done the right thing.”

Another plaintiff, Miriam Stancic, who has a bachelor’s degree in Russian and Slavic languages, recalled: “They told me they had a more qualified applicant, but I found that was not the case.”

Fredrickson said that the settlement “should be a wake-up call to the U.S. government and employers across the country: The cost of discrimination is high.”

Attorneys said that the size of the settlement reflects the lengthy 23-year time frame, the large awards decided upon by the special master and the gross misconduct by USIA and VOA documented in Richey’s 1984 ruling.

Richey found that for many years, female job-seekers at VOA were discouraged from pursuing jobs in a number of ways. One supervisor told a female candidate that her broadcast duties would have to deal only with entertainment features and fashion, while more important issues, such as news and politics, would be better accepted from male announcers, the judge said.

A woman’s place was “at the stove, not on the air,” another was told. Women took too many leaves and were distracting to male employees; they should stay at home with their children, supervisors told them.

In citing these examples, Richey found them in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

He added that VOA supervisors, who were predominantly male, used word-of-mouth recruiting to hire males, restricted vacancy announcements to the already majority-male work force, allowed men to apply for jobs after the posted closing date and pre-selected men for jobs.

Susan Brackshaw, who served as co-counsel with Fredrickson, told reporters that one reason for the agreement was that the Justice Department in recent years has been looking at complaints of discrimination more seriously. “They decided it was the right thing to do,” Brackshaw said.

But she added: “This settlement is a tribute to the commitment and courage of 1,100 women who stood shoulder to shoulder in the face of deep-rooted discrimination and would not surrender even after two decades of litigation.”