Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  The trend story we should have seen:

  NOW MORE THAN EVER! INEQUITY AND INTIMIDATION

  Reports of sex discrimination and sexual harassment reached record highs in the decade—by both private and federal employees. Women’s sex discrimination complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission climbed by nearly 25 percent in the Reagan years—and by 40 percent among federally employed women just in the first half of the ’80s. Complaints of exclusion, demotions, and discharges on the basis of sex rose 30 percent. General harassment of women, excluding sexual harassment, more than doubled. And while the EEOC’s public relations office issued statements claiming that sexual harassment in corporate America was falling, its own figures showed that annual charges of sexual harassment nearly doubled in the decade.

  Throughout much of the ’80s, women were also far more likely than men to lose their jobs or get their wages cut—and legal challenges to remedy the imbalance went nowhere in the courts. Press accounts to the contrary, the mass layoffs of the ’80s actually took a greater toll on female service workers than male manufacturing workers—the service sector accounted for almost half of the job displacement in the decade, nearly 10 percentage points more than manufacturing. And even among blue-collar workers, women suffered higher unemployment rates than men. In the federal “reductions in force” in the early ’80s, too, women who held higher-paid civil-service jobs (G.S. 12 and above) got laid off at more than twice the average rate. Far more working women than men were also forced into the part-time work force and expanding “temp” pools of the ’80s, where women faced an extraordinary pay gap of 52 cents to a man’s dollar and labored with little to no job security, insurance, benefits, or pension. Even among displaced workers who managed to get rehired, women had it worse. Women in service jobs who were reemployed had to settle for pay reductions of 16 percent, nearly double the reductions borne by their male counterparts.

  If we heard less about discrimination in the ’80s workplace, that was partly because the federal government had muzzled, or fired, its equal-employment investigators. At the same time that the EEOC’s sex discrimination files were overflowing, the Reagan administration was cutting the agency’s budget in half and jettisoning its caseload. The year Reagan came into office, the EEOC had twenty-five active class-action cases; a year later, it had none. The agency scaled back the number of suits it pursued by more than 300 percent. A House Education and Labor Committee report found that in the first half of the ’80s, the number of discrimination victims receiving compensation fell by two-thirds. By 1987, a General Accounting Office study found that EEOC district offices and state equal-employment agencies were closing 40 to 80 percent of their cases without proper, or any, investigation.

  A similar process was taking place in the other federal agencies charged with enforcing equal opportunity for women and minorities. At the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, for example, back-pay awards fell from $9.3 million in 1980 to $600,000 in 1983; the number of government contractors that this agency barred from federal work because of discrimination fell from five in the year before Reagan took office to none a year after his inauguration. In fact, in a 1982 study, every OFCC staff member interviewed said that they had never found a company not to be in compliance. This wasn’t because American corporations had suddenly reformed: the majority of federal contractors polled in the same study said they just felt no pressure to comply with the agency’s affirmative action requirements anymore.

  • • •

  AN EXHAUSTIVE study of women’s occupational patterns in the ’80s would be outside the scope of this book. But it is possible to tell the stories of some women in key representative employment areas—from the white-collar media to the pink-collar sales force to the most embattled blue-collar universe. These are women who, one way or another, set themselves against the backlash in the work force and, in the process, ran up against the barriers built by employers, male peers, judges, government officials, and even “feminist” scholars. They had to face ridicule, ostracism, threats, and even physical assaults—as they simply tried to make a living.

  WOMEN IN THE MEDIA

  Women’s employment in the press and broadcasting is worth special attention because of the media’s central role in propagating the myths of the backlash. If newspapers, magazines, and television stations had managements and staffs that more nearly reflected the proportion of women in the general population—or, for that matter, in their audiences—maybe they would have reported all the backlash trends of the ’80s exactly the same way. But maybe, just maybe, they would have told a different story.

  In the winter of 1988, some prominent figures in the media gathered on a stage on the University of Southern California campus for a three-day conference, entitled “Women, Men and Media, Breakthroughs and Backlash.” But as the hours passed and the speakers delivered their reports, it became increasingly difficult to spot the breakthroughs through all the backlash.

  Four female media executives had been enlisted a year earlier to represent “Breakthrough Women” on the panel; but by the time the conference rolled around, three of them no longer held their high-level posts. The female panelists said they weren’t surprised. “Women have not grasped the power and there’s an enormous amount of backsliding,” newscaster Marcia Brandwynne told the audience. Jennifer Siebens, a CBS broadcaster, called the situation in her field “extraordinarily bleak” and warned young women in the audience, “Anybody who has a fantasy of becoming a serious on-air reporter with a major network or more critically with a local station, forget it.” Former ABC vice president Marlene Sanders, the first woman to anchor a network news show in 1964, told the conference that women at ABC were now reporting the same set of grievances that “we had attempted to resolve ten years earlier.”

  The news from the audience was just as discouraging: A former local TV news producer told what happened at her station after the network downsized the newsroom—all the women on staff were fired. News camerawoman Catherine Cummings reported, “There is less opportunity now. . . . It’s worse than fifteen years ago when I started. It’s actually worse.” Even on the USC campus at the Daily Trojan, a journalism student stood up to say, women’s representation was slipping, and only two of the sixteen senior editors were now women. Even in the auditorium, conference participants could witness the female vanishing act in progress: the proceedings here were being filmed by an all-male camera crew.

  In another era such an outpouring of grievances from working women at a conference might have ignited outrage and a call to action. But in keeping with the resigned and more “femininely” decorous tone that often prevailed under the backlash, a number of panelists counseled against lawsuits or confrontation, and the conference’s leaders vowed only to form a steering committee that would “monitor” events and meet once a year. And when it came time for assigning blame, some of the speakers simply turned on women—or the women’s movement. Panelist Linda Alvarez, a weekday news co-anchor at KNBC in Burbank, said women had plenty of opportunities at her station and the only thing holding women back in broadcasting was their “attitude”—some women just didn’t try hard enough. (Alvarez didn’t mention the sex discrimination suit pending against her station, a suit charging the station with repeatedly promoting less experienced young men to the all-male camera crew while repeatedly bypassing its only female sound technician, a veteran with a hard-working reputation.) Another speaker dismissed the glass ceiling as a “self-inflicted metaphor.” Panelist Anne Taylor Fleming, then a columnist for the New York Times, didn’t make any critical comments about her employer’s weak affirmative action efforts. But she was happy to blame feminism for working women’s troubles. The movement sidetracked her sex, she charged, by focusing efforts on greater public access and power for women. “This word empowerment,” she said in a tone of genteel distaste. “I keep hearing it as a male word.” The womanly part of her, she said, “just shrinks” from it. Her speech sparked a hearty round of
applause.

  • • •

  IN THE early ’70s, federal legislation enacted under intense lobbying efforts by NOW culminated in the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. This act first cleared the way for women to enter broadcasting and print journalism in significant numbers. As a result, a group of women who were to become the most prominent female newscasters of their generation joined the networks around the same time. The “Class of ’72,” as they were later dubbed, included such well-known names as Jane Pauley, formerly of NBC’s “Today” show, former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl, and “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour”’s correspondent Judy Woodruff. Under the Carter administration, women’s numbers in broadcasting and print continued to rise because of the FCC’s strict enforcement of affirmative action and the many legal actions taken by female journalists themselves. This litigation led to a series of consent decrees that required news employers to take steps to hire and promote women and equalize wages.

  But Reagan’s new FCC commissioner, Mark Fowler, like so many Reagan appointees, sought to abolish his agency’s own regulations. Under his tenure, the FCC severely cut back on the information it compiled on women and minority employees, making it virtually impossible to document discrimination in class-action suits. And the information the FCC did still make available was misleading, often ludicrously so. “Eighty percent of TV employees can’t all be decisionmakers,” a five-year study of the broadcasting industry’s hiring practices wryly observed of a particularly absurd case of statistic-doctoring.

  With government pressure gone, the little progress that women had made at the networks began unraveling. Before, the networks had only had two female nighttime anchors, Marlene Sanders and Barbara Walters; by the late ’80s, they had none. CBS forced out Sanders, a distinguished, senior TV newscaster, by “reassigning” her to a late-night radio slot usually reserved for junior reporters. At the “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,” Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the first black women to anchor a national newscast, was quietly pushed back into a slot as secondary backup anchor. “60 Minutes” correspondent Meredith Vieira was fired because she was pregnant and wanted to work part-time temporarily. By 1990, even one of the backlash’s favorite bugaboos—the ticking biological clock—helped clear another female face off the set. CBS’s Connie Chung announced she was sharply curtailing her anchoring duties—and taking an $800,000 pay cut—because she needed to take “a very aggressive approach” to getting pregnant.

  The networks took a string of “aging” women anchors and put them out to pasture, replacing them with either much older men or much younger—and much less well paid—women. In 1989, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine, the popular Jane Pauley was pushed out of her co-anchor slot on the “Today” show, in a very public and humiliating campaign, and replaced by the younger and blonder Deborah Norville (who was later bumped for another youthful model, Katie Couric, at half her salary). This wasn’t a decision made with viewers in mind: Pauley’s ratings were much higher than those of her male co-host, Bryant Gumbel, and her expulsion caused the show to torpedo to the very bottom of the morning ratings, even below the cartoons. At CBS, Kathleen Sullivan was yanked from the morning news show to make way for the younger and blonder Paula Zahn, whom the network’s male brass deemed both a more comely and upstanding model of true womanhood than the divorced Sullivan. “Paula’s married with a child; Kathleen is a single woman” was how CBS executive producer Erik Sorenson explained it to the press. “You get some differences in how settled a per son feels.” (Ironically, Sullivan was the same anchor who had so gamely hosted the network’s patronizing series on the psychic ills of single women a few years earlier.)

  This pattern was even more prevalent at local news stations. “Most of the male-female co-anchors on local TV,” Marlene Sanders observed, “resemble most men’s second marriages.” In the most celebrated dismissal of a local female news anchor, Christine Craft of Metromedia’s KMBC-TV in Kansas was demoted to reporter in 1982 because she was deemed “too old, too unattractive, and not sufficiently deferential to men.” When a jury ruled in her favor in a later court case, the judge simply threw out the jury’s verdict, and then tongue-lashed Craft for her “apparent indifference to matters of appearance.”

  By 1983, the number of female anchors was falling at commercial TV stations nationwide, a national survey by the Radio-Television News Directors Association reported. By 1989, only eight women were among the one hundred most frequently seen correspondents—down from fifteen just a year earlier. And the trouble female anchors were facing was repeated across the spectrum of TV jobs: the number of female sportscasters, for instance, dropped from 2 to 0.4 percent between 1977 and 1987. And at the highest levels in the networks, the already tiny numbers of women in policymaking posts stalled or shrunk. A 1987 survey found that women constituted about 6 percent of all TV news vice presidents, general managers, and presidents—barely changed from 1978. At CBS, the count of female vice presidents had gone from four to one; at NBC from one to zero.

  Meanwhile at major newspapers, the court-negotiated consent decrees were running out by the mid ’80s—and the media corporations’ enthusiasm for equal opportunity expired with them. Progress in improving newsrooms’ sex ratios stalled after 1982, a survey conducted by Ohio State University researchers found. At the Washington Post, a guild study finds, the pay gap between the sexes worsened after 1985—the final effective year of the Post’s conciliation agreement to settle a sex-discrimination suit. By 1987, Newspaper Guild records show, white women at the Post were making an average of $204 less a week than men, and the gap for black female reporters had doubled in five years. While the New York Times’s consent decree was in effect, the wage gap at the paper had slowly improved—and, again, once the decree expired, the gap quickly began to widen once more. By 1989, women’s representation in the New York Times newsroom hadn’t improved much, either. The total number of women employed as reporters, critics, and correspondents was fifty-four, only fourteen more than in 1972. The New York Times sports department had no female reporters in 1972; in 1989, it had one.

  After 1982, newspaper managements’ efforts to promote women to top newspaper posts fell off, too. After having reached a “high” of 2 percent in 1982, the annual gain women made in becoming directing editors slipped to 0.5 percent by 1984, and barely improved for the rest of the decade. Nearly 90 percent of directing editor jobs were held by men. By the late ’80s, 76 percent of newspaper dailies had no female associate editors, executive editors, managing editors, editors, editorial chiefs, or any women in variations of these job titles, according to a national survey conducted for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Despite this pathetic record, at an ASNE panel on women’s status in 1988, Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee pronounced from the podium that women’s presence in media management has “changed radically in the last ten years.”

  The problem wasn’t on the supply end. Women’s desire to enter media jobs was at an all-time high. The numbers of women entering journalism schools climbed steeply, and throughout the decade two-thirds of all journalism school graduates were women. A 1989 ASNE survey found these female journalists had even higher grades and expressed more ambition than their male colleagues. Yet, in this same period, newsrooms remained 65 percent male and continued to hire far more men than women. At large daily papers, women made up less than a third of the staff. In fact, women were only in the majority at small suburban papers with substandard pay.

  Remarkably, at the same time that women’s status in journalism was eroding on almost every front, complaints began surfacing in newsrooms and broadcasting crews that the field now had “too many women.” While on assignment in 1982, NBC sound technician Lee Serrie recalls, one of the cameramen started to complain bitterly about “all the ground men have lost in the last ten years.” Yet, he held his job because the station had earlier laid off its only female camerawoman during a downsizing—and then had given the vacancy to him. (
Serrie, on the other hand, had to sue to get the network even to consider her for a probationary camera slot.) Fears of a “feminized” profession may have been reinforced by the tendency of the media’s personnel officers to use affirmative action as the all-purpose alibi when rejecting white male applicants. “I’ve seen them send out these rejection letters saying, ‘Sorry, but we had to hire a black or a woman,’ when the real reason they didn’t hire the guy was that he’s unqualified,” says an editor who witnessed this practice firsthand at the New York Times.

  The real problem for media men was not that there were “too many women” but simply fewer jobs in journalism. Corporate mergers, falling ad lineage, declining circulation, collapsing afternoon newspapers, and a shrinking market share for network news—all of these forces helped to cut into employment in print journalism and, at the networks, to provoke mass layoffs in the 1980s, layoffs that, despite male complaints, hurt women more than men.

  Under the economically contracting, backlash-influenced climate of ’80s newsrooms, female journalists started backing away from the more aggressive tactics that a previous generation of women had exercised to claim their rights. Dangled instructively before this younger generation of women were the fates of former female activists at their companies. At NBC, two female producers who had played key roles in a sex discrimination suit against the network were forced out and replaced by inexperienced young white men—at the same salary. At the New York Times, all the named plaintiffs in the sex discrimination suit suffered major career setbacks, and most had to leave the paper. These stories did not inspire those who remained behind to mount a repeat performance. “There’s apparently a smell of cordite that we give off that terrifies the younger women,” observed Betsy Wade, a central figure in the New York Times suit, who was herself shunted to late-night duty.