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DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN

TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1970

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D.C. The special subcommittee met, pursuant to recess, at 10:20 a.m. in room 2251, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Edith Green (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Green and Burton.

Staff members present: Harry Hogan, counsel; Robert Andringa, minority professional staff assistant; and Sheldon Batchelder, minority research assistant.

Mrs. GREEN. The subcommittee will come to order for the further consideration of the higher education bills that are under the jurisdiction of this committee.

This morning we are pleased to have as our first witness_Nancy Dowding, the president of the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), Cuyahoga Community College, if Nancy Dowding will come to the table. I think it might be well if we had all of the witnesses that are scheduled to be here this morning come to the table and present their statements. Then the members of the committee could direct questions to any of the several witnesses.

May I ask Dr. Laurine Fitzgerald, Michigan State University, in charge of student services; Dr. Frances Norris, Washington; and Susan Ross and Diane Blank, law students from New York University to come to the table?

Now, may I ask Nancy Dowding to present her statement first.

STATEMENT OF DR. NANCY DOWDING, PRESIDENT, WOMEN'S EQUITY ACTION LEAGUE; AND COUNSELOR, CUYAHOGA COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Dr. DOWDING. I am Dr. Nancy E. Dowding, counselor at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. I am also a member of the American Psychological Association, and am currently national president of the Women's Equity Action League.

I might note that at ths time I do not identify myself as a member of the American Personnel and Guidance Association because as of this date I plan to discontinue my membership since the organization has persisted in using sex segregated help wanted listings in their placement bulletin.

I come before this distinguished committee on behalf of H.R. 16098, known as the "Omnibus Post-Secondary-Education Act of 1970," to

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ask your serious consideration of changes in the counseling services and career choices for girls and women. In discussing these issues with contemporary college women, they indicated to me that the problems center more on sins of omission, rather than commission, and that in general young women were simply not expected to plan for a serious and fulfilling career, and that they most certainly are not seriously encouraged to do so. The career counseling problems of young women seem to rest more in what is not said rather than in overt discrimination.

Interestingly enough, this is the same thesis set forth by nationally recognized author Caroline Bird, a member of WEAL's national advisory board. In her book "Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down," she writes of "The Invisible Bar."

Even if a girl tries for a professional career she may be actively discouraged. Educators hold vocational guidance counselors responsible for the scandalous waste of talent. *** In the 1960's guidance counselors were urged to encourage adolescent girls toward careers. The counselors were told to be positive. Instead of saying, "Have you thought how you would manage to do that if you had children?" they were instructed to say, "Veterinary practice is a good field for a woman, because she can carry it on near her home." A girl who had a reasonably enlightened high-school counselor might not even realize that she had to get much higher marks than a boy to get into a coed college. But the closer she approached paying work, the more she was slowed by the unspoken assumption that a woman really could not be serious about a vocation but must be working to mark time, earn a little money, or if she were obviously gifted "just for fun." This is the Invisible Bar that keeps women down.

The Invisible Bar is unofficial. It is effective because almost everyone accepts it. Officially, graduate and professional schools invite women to apply. In private, their administrators deplore wasting facilities on women who marry and do not use their education, but "throw it away to get married and have babies." * * Girls who go to women's colleges sometimes crash unexpectedly on the Invisible Bar when they look for their first jobs. *** Employers seem equally dismayed. They don't always know what to do with college girls. Big companies give a Princeton senior who has majored in English an aptitude test to see where he might fit, but give a Vassar senior who has majored in English a typing test.

A young woman graduate of Wellsley told me of her encounter with the Invisible Bar in these words, "I went to a girls' college, and I just never learned I was inferior."

The problem is stated vividly by Mrs. Elizabeth Koontz, director of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor who was recently quoted:

None of the ladies on television seem concerned with anything beyond finding a hair coloring that will keep her looking young eternally, making sure the family brushes after every meal and finding a floor wax that won't yellow over. The girl who suspects that there might be more to life than this has to go her own way more or less against the weight of society's opinions and expectations.

What a sad indictment of an affluent society.

Along with the Invisible Bar, women are often discouraged from attempting career fields because they are regarded as "inappropriate" choices. Thus, it has been noted by Dr. Pauli Murray, a black woman attorney, writer, and teacher, that while violence has been "the ultimate weapon of resistance to racial desegregation, its psychic counterpart, ridicule, has been used to resist sex equality."

Perhaps it would be better if we could just acknowledge the need for changes and new approaches in vocational counseling for young women, and turn our attention to positive action to accomplish these goals. A helpful pamphlet from the women's bureau states:

the career "sights" of all too many of our girls are still limited and unrealistic. Most girls have a romantic image of life: school, marriage, a familyand they live happily ever after. But this is not the complete picture. A more accurate life pattern of the modern woman includes school, work and/or marriage, rearing a family (sometimes continuing to work by either choice or necessity), and a return to work when the youngest child is in school. This "quiet revolution" in the life pattern of American women presents a special challenge to those responsible for the counseling of girls.

This last sentence is an important observation, for it implies that counselors need to be made aware of the realistic demands that will be placed on women in our society so that they can be prepared to meet them adequately. It would be my educated guess that a great many professional counselors assisting girls today are not really oriented to the new life style that the younger generation has assumed. But counselors must help girls to consider seriously the significant facts, encourage them to prepare for their dual role as homemakers and workers, and assist them to plan now for a total life. It is my opinion that counselors are partly responsible for the fact that in April 1969, the largest number of women workers (9.8 million) were employed in clerical jobs. About 4.7 million were service workers, 4.4 million were operatives, and 4.1 million were in professional and technical occupations.

Women's Bureau statistics show that in 1967 women workers (14 years and over) had median wage and salary incomes of $3,139 compared with $6,584 for men. The median for full-time year-round women workers in 1967 was $4,273 compared with $7,298 for men. Yet women are the numerical majority of our population!

If we were to allow for the proportion of women who neither choose to nor have to work outside their own homes, the percentages noted above are still obviously disparate.

An important part of the answer to this disparity in women's educational attainment and earnings lies in the goals and aspirations of these women when they were girls. Counselors in particular can and should help women recognize the new realities.

If we might assume, then, that adequate counseling will be provided to encourage the capable to seek additional education and preparation beyond high school, it becomes readily apparent that the next concern is the financing of such education. And that in turn highlights the need to give young women equal opportunity to qualify for scholarship moneys and aid programs, so that their efforts are recognized and rewarded on the same basis as males. In working with mature women who come to the community college, there is a very real need to provide some assistance with tuition when they are feeling the financial stress of raising their families or living on pensions or limited incomes.

If we further assume that a woman has made her way inside the college doors, it would be well to consider what choices she will have for a satisfying career. No doubt women will always tend to choose areas of social service, by the very nature of our culture; but by the same token, some women-when given a truly free choice-will elect careers from a much broader vocational spectrum. When freed of the stereotyped "appropriate" selection, women of quite equal merit with their social service sisters will elect business, politics, law, medicine, pharmacy, and engineering (just as men are increasingly free to pur

sue notable careers in the gentler social science areas). As the style of dress of the wholesome youth of today (casual, but not unwashed) signals a lessening of stereotyped male and female roles, so too is there an easing of the rigid lines of "proper" male and female career choices. These early signs of vocational progress need to be protected and encouraged.

The statement of Congresswoman Griffiths in the Congressional Record of March 9, 1970, would support the thesis that counseling services for young college women are inadequate. She states:

The tragic fact today is that women are losing ground in every segment of university life. Their proportion as students in college is not increasing. Their proportion as students at the graduate level is less now then in 1930.

Yet, let us contrast this with our awareness that education and employment have a positive correlation. A fact sheet from the Women's Bureau reminds us, "There is a direct relationship between the educational attainment of women and their labor force participation. The more education a woman has received, the greater likelihood that she will be engaged in paid employment."

To recognize that 20 percent of the girls in our American society do not finish high school seems to me an unacceptably high percentage, especially considering that 20 percent of this group are unemployed (28.6 percent for black girls, 16.9 percent for white).

Mrs. GREEN. Is that for people between 16 and 21?

Dr. DOWDING. This goes through high school age, so I would assume that it extends to 18, to my knowledge.

Women industrial workers and their union representatives report that they are always used as a casual labor pool, being last hired and first fired-as the economy fluctuates-another good reason to protect women with education and working skills.

It may be that part of the problem rests in the way we really see girls and women in our society. When we consider the limited programs and activities that are made available for girls, in contrast with the number of directed activities for boys, it causes one to consider that the lack of adequate and proper planning for girls may result from a kind of psychological invisibility (rather reminiscent of the psychological invisibility that has been so damaging to Negroes in this country). If this is actually the case, it would be one more of many valid similarities in the unhappy conditions of women and blacks. And, if we do not clearly see girls and women as human beings of true and intrinsic worth and importance in our culture, then indeed they may receive only secondary consideration in the secondary school and collegiate counseling programs also. I defer to my colleague, Dr. Laurine Fitzgerald, for her professional opinions as a counselor educator for specific recommendations in this area.

Community and junior colleges have historically recognized the need for counseling services to assist students with the process of understanding themselves and their capabilities-indeed, this is a hallmark of the exciting role of community colleges in higher education. And this is one area where the older university system might learn from the junior colleges; reports coming in regarding those senior institutions indicate serious lacks of counseling services. What business

enterprise would push forward without a planned program of goals to justify the daily efforts? Yet many students are asked to pursue their educations without such purposeful planning or assistance with necessary changes and adjustments during the process.

This prompts consideration of needed publications, testing programs, and special materials for use in counseling girls and women. It is difficult to develop any meaningful library of materials for use on the secondary and postsecondary level. Special attention is needed too. in extending training programs for women in paratechnical and paraprofessional career fields, extending beyond the opportunity of training to be a file clerk or typist. Let us offer the same range and variety of programs that seem to be necessary for men in our society.

Social scientist Dr. Robert Amundson underscores the gap between the real and the ideal as reflected in different perceptions of males and females in our society, noting.

Rigid compartmentalization of what is masculine and what is feminine in our society is aided and abetted by some very inept counseling in our schools which often are suggested goals to our youth which are unsuited to the second half of the 20th Century. Even the so-called more traditional roles suggested to young women-those of homemaker, nurse, social worker, and teacher-are often described in a pollyanna style about a world that never was.

Dr. Amundson is involved with the unique Research Center on Woman at Loretto Heights College in Denver which seeks new awareness of woman's role in society. Their literature points out the need to offer women alternatives in choosing a life style of work, study, and homemaking, and a comparable need to educate women about the existence of these alternatives.

And interestingly enough, their publications quote from the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1963, to this effect:

Illumined by values transmitted through home and school and church, society and heritage, and informed by present and past experience, each woman must arrive at her contemporary expression of purpose, whether as a center of home and family, participant in the community, a contributor to the economy, a creative artist or thinker or scientist, or a citizen engaged in politics and public service. Part and parcel of this freedom is the obligation to assume corresponding responsibility.

The Women's Equity Action League strongly supports this approach to the individual's right to choose her own life style, blending education, employment, and homemaking into a meaningful expression of her true worth and being.. And as a professional counselor, I believe young men and women in our society welcome the opporsunity to offer such a choice of life style to women, and that they will responsibly fulfill the obligations and promises that such an approach holds.

Thank you.

Mrs. GREEN. Thank you very much, Dr. Dowding. As a counselor, when you see the statistics that out of 278,000 slots in the apprentice program only 1 percent are held by girls; how does this affect your counseling of young people?

Dr. DOWDING. Well, I don't think that we have many alternatives at this time except to encourage the girls to try for those programs that are available, but I think that we need to increase the number of

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