EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR'S REPORT
IfYou Knew, What Difference Would it Make? If you knew answers to improper
interview questions when hiring a new lawyer what difference would it make? Would you apply stereotypes instead of evaluating the individual? During discussions at a program conducted by our Opportunities for Women and Minorities Committee this spring at the law school in Fayetteville, it became painfully obvious that discriminatory hiring practices are still very much alive in Arkansas. Major statistical proof included included women in the upper part of the class being offered jobs with law firms at a much slower rate than men with similar academic records. A look at law firms shows few minority associates and very very few partners. Anecdotal sharing revealed either blatant disregard by interviewing lawyers of the rules growing out of TItle 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against asking prospective employees (seemingly always women) about marital status, plans to have children and similar personal information or transparent ruses to get information. The student knew what was happening, felt violated, had doubts whether the firm was a good place to work and was left with the dilemma of whether to answer or remind the interviewer that such questions were not permitted. The interviewer often had no idea of the image he (always he) was creating of representing a firm of Neanderthals who were unwilling to abide by nondiscrimination portions of employment laws, who found using stereotypes about women with families not being as dedicated or as available for work as men was easier than thinking about the abilities of the woman and what she could contribute through her legal training and ability and who were unable to recognize that their firms risk being left behind if their associates do not reflect the diversity of today's society.
I BY WILLIAM A, MARTIN Certainly not everyone is this way. One woman graduate with an outstanding record told me of being selected as an associate by a moderate size firm who confided that they were concerned that a number of women clients or potential clients were turned off by a dozen or so white males who might lack empathy for their particular problems. As more and more women and minorities succeed in business, as they control a larger share of society's assets, as they become more able to select lawyers who look like them, the firms who do not have women and minority members are going to be left behind. How did we get this way? What do we do? What will be the result? I look to the words of that great theologian and observer of human nature who left us many profound thoughts hidden within the lyrics of musical plays, Oscar Hammerstein II. In South Pacific we are told: "You've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made and people whose skin is a different shade, you've got to be carefully taught, you've got to be taught before i~s too late, before you
are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate." I carry the baggage of being raised in south ArkanS<;1s in the thirties and forties when the white establishment never even questioned our biases. Without my teachers realizing what they were doing, I was carefully taught. The best I, and many of my generation, can ever hope to be is, as Pat Lynch described himself, a recovering bigot. Recovery does not come unless we work at it both individually and with groups like our Committee on Opportunities for Women and Minorities. The establishment has so long discriminated against and been insensitive to the needs of women and minority lawyers that they are suspicious of even the good faith efforts of the former discriminators to change themselves and the profession. Whether the motivation is to do right or because it makes good business sense now to be inclusive, all of us need to act as if the efforts will succeed. Then they have a much better chance. As the king sang in "It's a Puzzlement:" "Unless someday somebody trusts somebody, there'll be nothing left on Earth excepting fishes." Where will this all come out? Hillary Rodham Clinton says when she was asked to Chair the American Bar Commission on Opportunities for Women she first thought she was being asked to address problems that were solved in the sixties. As she got into the work she found the problems, especially the glass ceiling preventing advancement, are still here. We are making progress but improvements and solutions take longer than they should. Even when we are frustrated because too little changes and even that change is too slow we have to keep trying, like the nurse Nellie Forbush from Little Rock singing "Cockeyed Optimist" in South Pacific: "1'01 stuck like a dope with a thing called hope and I can't get it out of my heart."