Furthermore, I was not even given representation for an issue which should have been appealed on the basis of the Washington Administrative Code and there are other issues that I can not go into at this time. You can also forget about the American Association of University Women. I can be a member of their organization because I hold a college degree, but the organization will not even consider helping with legal fees for a woman who is not faculty or an administrator. This bothers me because curiously, in every one of our cases, there was at least one woman administrator involved in the retaliation against us for filing complaints against the university. I guess these women see themselves as honorary old boys or, more likely, they re afraid.
Women faculty and administrators have a lot to lose.
Bringing a complaint of sex discrimination or just supporting the complaints of other women can literally ruin their careers after they have invested so much of their lives obtaining advanced degrees and worked very hard to advance to the top of their fields. A case in point is Dr. Margaret Billingham, a distinguished scientist and researcher who spent twenty years building a program in Cardiac Pathology at Stanford University. Her career was destroyed because she reported what women in the Department of Radiology had told her about their experiences of harassment and discrimination. I hope that women will become more aware of what they are up against in the university workplace. The attacks on Affirmative Action are hatched in the halls of academe under the guise of scholarly study.