Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993 TAG: 9302210145
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
CAPITOL HILL HARASSMENT PERVASIVE
Women working on Capitol Hill say they routinely lose out on pay and promotions to male colleagues, and one-third of those women questioned in a Washington Post survey also report they had been sexually harassed.A majority of the 603 female employees interviewed also said women working for Congress are less respected and less valued than their male colleagues.
They talked about a still-dominant male culture on the Hill that made even senior female staff workers feel like "outsiders" - and sometimes like intruders. "You see it at meetings where women kind of vanish into the woodwork, even when their issues are discussed," said Nancy Weist, legislative assistant to Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.
Yet, at other times, women who work on the Hill said they received too much unwanted and uninvited attention from some lawmakers. One out of nine women surveyed said she had been sexually harassed by a member of Congress.
Nearly half of the women interviewed said they feared retaliation if they reported an incident of harassment to the congressional office set up to handle such complaints.
Following allegations of sexual harassment directed at Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., The Washington Post sought to learn more about working conditions for women on Capitol Hill. In January, the Post surveyed staff aides selected at random from a list of 17,000 people who worked for Congress last year.
In striking ways, the survey revealed that working conditions for women on the Hill are not so different from those of working women overall.
"You'd think working on Capitol Hill, we'd be further along," Weist said. "But we aren't."
Yet Capitol Hill is different in one crucial and troublesome way, women said. Discrimination complaints are handled internally by offices created by the two chambers, not by an independent agency such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As a result, many of those surveyed said they doubted that their grievances will be handled fairly or confidentially.
Many questioned Congress' overall commitment on the issue, noting that until recently Congress had exempted itself from the federal anti-discrimination and civil rights laws that it had enacted for other workplaces.
In the survey and in subsequent interviews, women described the two different faces that Capitol Hill shows to working women.
One is the face that most first saw as schoolchildren, the textbook view of Capitol Hill.
But Capitol Hill also shows another face to women, a male face, a distant, smirking, and occasionally sinister face.
"Oh, yes, there are the jokes about women, jokes about female body parts, there are humorous put-downs of women, and sometimes derogatory comments, but done in a light, joking way so as to make it difficult to raise an objection without being thought of as a wet blanket," said Nelle Temple Brown, a professional staff member on the international development subcommittee of the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee.
In many different ways, Brown said the culture and "spirit" of the Hill send this message to women: "You are outsiders here."
Most of the time, female aides said, the message that they are outsiders is communicated in subtle, indirect and ambiguous ways. But not always.
One woman described how a senator, searching for a table on which to place a letter he wanted to sign, put it on the bosom of a female staff worker and signed it.
Another woman recalled the juvenile hoots and smirks of House members who "practically fell out of their seats" ogling a female staffer who had leaned over to deliver a message to a colleague at a recent hearing.
Others described the demoralizing drizzle of "honeys" and "girls" and "darlings" that rains down daily on many female employees, particularly from some older legislators.
According to the Post survey, 34 percent of the female workers questioned reported they had been harassed on the job.
On the Hill, one-third of those harassment victims - 11 percent of all female staff workers questioned - said they had been sexually harassed by a congressman or a senator, the survey found. Overall, 59 percent said they or another aide they personally knew had been the victim of sexual harassment.
But sexual harassment was just one of a number of related problems that working women face on Capitol Hill. In fact, sexual harassment ranked well down the list of the biggest problems cited by the women surveyed.
While about one in four women interviewed said that sexual harassment was a problem for women who work for Congress, six in 10 said not being taken as seriously as men was a problem on the Hill. Nearly two out of three identified unequal pay for equal work as a problem.
"It's everywhere on the Hill," said Weist, who said her boss, Engel, was one of the "good guys" in Congress. Still, she has "found it much harder to capture his attention" than male staffers, a problem repeatedly mentioned by other professional women on the Hill.
Weist and others pointedly noted that the gender pecking order inevitably is established in meetings. "The member, of course, is always introduced first, the male staffers next, and I am always introduced last."
Jana Kollias, executive assistant to Rep. Thomas Andrews, D-Maine, was reminded recently of the differences between men's and women's work on the Hill when she was sent to the Rayburn House Office Building to pick up her office's allotment of tickets to the Bill Clinton inauguration. "Every single person waiting in line was a woman," she said. "It was striking."