Women in the U.S.

Today
By Sonia Kane and Suzanne McCabe | May 9, 2011

Women in the U.S. have made big advances in every field. Yet discrimination
still exists. How far have women really come?
Perhaps you want to be a lawyer when you grow up. Whether you are a boy or
a girl, chances are you find nothing extraordinary about such an ambition. Peggy Kerr,
now a top lawyer at Skadden, Arps in New York City, knew she wanted to be a lawyer
at age 15. But that was back in the early 1960s.
"I kept it quiet then," she says. "No girls wanted to be lawyers. I thought people
might disapprove."
Elizabeth Head, the first woman lawyer to be hired at Skadden (in 1957) recalls
the day the partners (senior lawyers who share in the overall profits of the firm)
interviewed her.
"They held a meeting right in front of me," she says, "to debate whether it would
ruin the firm to have a woman lawyer."
Women are entering the legal provision today in unprecedented numbers.
Relatively few, however, become partners in the firms they enter. Of the 178 partners
at Skadden, Arps in 1989, only 23, including Peggy Kerr, were women.

The Glass Ceiling

The same is true of many professions. Although more doors are open to women
today, there seems to be a "glass ceiling," a level above which women do not rise.
Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History and former
president of Barnard College in New York City, says "Young women have
opportunities to pursue careers in virtually all fields of human endeavor, but their
opportunities remain largely those of training and entry....There are few women...at
the very tops of their occupational fields."
Even women who are very successful in their careers face limitations because
they are women. Meredith Vieira, a news correspondent for ABC's Turning
Point told Junior Scholastic "I've had the opportunity to do most of the stories a man
could do, except for one thing. I wanted to go overseas for a long time. I wanted to
cover the Middle East, and I was never given the chance."
Vieira, who has been in TV news for 12 years, says that an executive told her,
"I just don't want you to get killed over there." "That would never have happened with
a man," she says. "It's assumed that a man knows how to take care of himself.
"I don't think women and minorities are well-represented at the networks," Vieira
continued. "It is still a boys' club in a lot of ways."

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