Ruth Bader Ginsburg Interview (page: 4 / 5) Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court	Print Interview

A famous Justice of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter, was asked to consider hiring you as one of his law clerks. You had amazing qualifications, having been on the law reviews of both Columbia and Harvard. You were recommended by a Harvard professor. Was it the dean?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was Al Sachs. He was still a professor then. He later became dean.

And you tied for first place in your graduating class at Columbia. What was Justice Frankfurter's reaction?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Justice Frankfurter, like his colleagues, was just not prepared to hire a woman. Now these were pre-Title VII days, so there was nothing unlawful about discriminating against women. And gentlemen of a certain age at that time felt that they would be discomfited by a woman in chambers, that they might have to watch what they say, they might have to censor their speech. It was surprising that Frankfurter had that typical -- in those days -- reaction, because he was the first justice to hire an African American as a law clerk some years before. But as I said, like many other federal judges of the time, he just wasn't prepared to hire a woman.

How did that feel to you at the time?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was expected. That was the way things were.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I applied for law firm jobs, Columbia had an excellent placement office, but sign up sheets would go up and many would say, "Men only." I had, as I have sometimes explained, three strikes that put me out when it came to employment as a lawyer. One is I am Jewish, and the law firms were just beginning to stop discriminating on the basis of religion. That affected Catholics as well as Jews. They were opening up to all people without regard to religion. And some, a precious few, were ready to try a woman, but none were willing to take a chance on a mother, and my daughter was four years old when I graduated from law school. So of course I was disappointed, but it wasn't unexpected.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

You have said that, in a sense, you yourself were a product of affirmative action in being hired by Columbia in the early 1960s. Were they looking to diversify their faculty?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The Women's Movement came alive in the United States in the late '60s, and the government in those days was heavily into affirmative action. People don't remember that affirmative action became a major item during Nixon's administration, and it started in the construction trades, which were highly exclusionary. There was a good deal of nepotism, so you got a starting job as an apprentice if your father or your uncle was a member of the union. And it was Nixon's Secretary of Labor who thought that the best way to break that exclusion was to have people who have contracts with government -- and many people do -- pledge to do two things. One was to set goals and timetables. The assumption was, "Now let's assume there would be no discrimination. About how many members of a minority group might be expected?" So you sent that number as the goal, and a timetable for when you would achieve it. And this was not something that was absolute. If there was a good reason why you couldn't comply, so be it. But it was necessary for people who held government contracts at least to make an effort. And most colleges and universities had government money of some sort. There was a very active office for civil rights in the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and the head of that office was a man named Stan Pottinger. He was visiting colleges and universities all over America to encourage them to fulfill their affirmative action obligations, and also to remind them that if they didn't, there was a possibility that their contracts might be suspended or even terminated. So in the year 1972, Columbia named two people to the faculty. One was an African American man, and one was a woman, the first ever hired in a tenured post.

And that was you.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I still go to Columbia regularly. I have a very close tie to Columbia because my daughter is on the Columbia Law School faculty, and a former law clerk of mine is the dean. David Schizer is the Dean of the Columbia Law School. His mother was a classmate of mine at Columbia. So I have strong connections to the Columbia Law School.

He was a law clerk of yours?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. David Schizer, who is now the Dean of Columbia Law School. It was my second year on the Supreme Court, so it would have been 1994 to '95. He was my very excellent law clerk.

I can imagine. When you became the first tenured woman on the faculty of Columbia Law School, did you feel some resentment from fellow faculty members, or by then was it more accepted?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I had a great deal of support from my faculty colleagues. None of them were resentful. Most of them were so secure about themselves and the excellence of the Columbia faculty, their idea was that if Columbia decided to engage me to be a tenured professor then I must be really good. And even if I were doing things that they didn't, that they would disagree with, they were backing me up. One example: I was named the law school's representative on the university senate. Women who were teaching in the university had a suspicion that they were not getting equal pay, so the start to finding out if that suspicion was right was finding out just what salaries the university was paying. And the administration's answer was, "That's secret information. All kinds of jealousies would result if we published them." And of course, you couldn't find out if Columbia was meeting its equal pay obligations without that information, which we eventually got and the suspicions proved right.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

That you were paid less than your male colleagues.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I wasn't, because coming on in 1972 they made certain that I would be treated as well as my male peers. But women who had worked at the university for years, who came on in the days when it was accepted to pay women less...

Were these women faculty members?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Faculty or top administrators.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The hardest thing for my colleagues to accept was when we -- and by we, I mean the ACLU women's rights project, which I helped to found -- challenged the TIAA CREF program, and the retirement program used by most colleges and universities, because they rigidly separated the policy beneficiaries by sex. So they used mortality tables for men, for women. And the women would get less when they retired than a man with equivalent salary and time in service. The reason was that on average it's fair, because women on average live longer than men. And my view was, "Yes, that's certainly true on average, but there are some men who live long and some women who die early." And the whole notion is that you don't lump together women simply because they are women, and that TIAA CREF should merge their mortality tables. Well, the immediate response was, "Horrors! We just couldn't do that. Then all the men would desert the plan and get private insurance." Well, TIAA CREF was such a good deal that when they did finally merge the tables, nobody left. But that was the most worrisome thing to my faculty colleagues. Even so, they supported a class action that was brought -- with 100 named plaintiffs -- on behalf of women teachers and administrators at Columbia, charging that maintaining separate mortality tables essentially denied women equal pay, and was in violation of our foremost anti-discrimination law, Title VII.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

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