Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 2, 1993 TAG: 9305020159
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Yes, we knew sexual harassment was going on in the workplace," she said at the meeting at the Holiday Inn-Tanglewood. "[But] such behavior doesn't blossom full-blown in adults."
It's played out earlier, she said, in school hallways and on school buses. "It's almost a way of life in the schools."
The AAUW study, titled "Hostile Hallways," surveyed 1,500 girls and boys in grades eight to 11.
Schuster, a community leader in Los Angeles, said the survey found that while most of the harassment is boys acting against girls, boys also harass boys - and girls can be harassers, too.
Schuster was optimistic, however, about the future of American girls and women. She said her organization is hopeful that new women in Congress and the Clinton administration will significantly improve the status of women.
At the White House, she said, "There is a new climate of access that we hardly know what to do with."
Members of the administration have consulted the AAUW's executive director twice in recent weeks to get the organization's feedback on issues, Schuster said. She also noted that U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno was an AAUW member in Miami for 20 years.
Sharon Leder, another convention speaker and instructor at Nassau Community College in New York, said in an interview Saturday that sexual discrimination continues to deny tenure to women at universities.
Leder, a women's studies specialist who has sued the State University of New York at Buffalo for tenure denial, said that although 29 percent of faculty members at American universities are women, few are granted the influence and permanence of academic tenure.
"You see a lot of women instructors and assistant professors," she said, and few tenured ones.
by CNB