PART 1

    Kiki Peppard sat in the 8 x 10 office of the owner of a manufacturing company in Mt. Pocono, Pa. She was confident she'd get the job. Not just I'd-like-a-job confident, but an I-know-I'm-the best-qualified-candidate confident. She typed 80 words a minute accurately, knew several relevant computer software programs, was excellent at organizing and evaluating data, had a good reputation for working with staff and the public, and was also a certified emergency medical technician. For more than 20 years, Peppard, formerly of Long Island now living in Effort, Pa., had been a secretary, administrative assistant, and bookkeeper, always with outstanding evaluations.

    But it wasn't outstanding evaluations this potential boss was concerned about. "You married?" he asked. Point-blank. First question. Not even a "Would you like coffee?" Just the tone of the interviewer's question made Peppard want to cry out that it was none of his business if she was married. But, what she did was quietly tell him she wasn't married.

    "Do you have kids?" he asked

    "Yes," she replied, equally polite but annoyed at the interviewer for asking it, at herself for answering it. She had a 16-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter, but she didn't know what any of this had to do with her ability to keep the financial records of a company with an annual revenue of about $2.5 million, for which this man was willing to pay her all of $7 an hour. But, Kiki Peppard was still polite. It wasn't going to last.

    "I'm not interested in hiring you," he said matter-of-factly. "Women with kids take too much time off of work," he declared, "so I don't bother hiring them."

    "How do you know that without checking my references and absentee record?" Peppard retorted.

    "Don't matter," the boss replied. "You're all the same."

    This boss may have thought because he owned a company he could do whatever he wanted to do, say whatever he wanted to say. But, he wasn't prepared to deal with Kiki Peppard who unleashed a Long Island attitude unbound by a dialect that would embolden her sarcasm for stupidity. The man almost drooled over his ignorance when he further declared he didn't hire "your kind of people," the "kind" who were single mothers who were forced to take welfare briefly while trying to find work. She told him that it was his kind of people who paid so poorly, and didn't hire qualified women who were the biggest contributors to the welfare state. And then, as if he thought he was still in control, he told this woman who had nothing but the highest recommendations that had she stayed married like she should have then she wouldn't have any of "these problems" he assumed single mothers had.

    Peppard was now mad. Not the mad you get when you think you might have the perfect job but mess up at the interview. Not even the mad you get when you learn the boss hired his niece. But the I'm-going-to-rip-this-moron-some-new- orifices-mad.

    For more than 20 job interviews Kiki Peppard had heard the same kind of questions, confronted the same kind of sexism. A contractor in Stroudsburg said he wouldn't hire her because single mothers weren't reliable when it snowed because "the kids are off from school and they have to stay home with them." She asked him that if the roads were so bad that schools were closed why would she risk going to work for a few bucks an hour? The boss, with attitudes forged by decades of ignorance, ordered her to leave his office.

    A manager of a mail order company in Tannersville asked about her marital status, her children, and her age. "That's illegal to ask," she stated. "Who's gonna know?" he replied. When she said she was going to file a complaint with the Human Relations Commission, she remembers the manager haughtily stating that by the time anyone from the state investigated, the applications would be missing, that it'd be her word against his, and that as a boss he could hire whomever he wanted.

    "When I held my ground and refused to answer such questions," Peppard says, "the interview was immediately terminated. "If I gave in to the intimidation and replied with the truth, I never got that job." The employers, she says, were "more intent upon learning about my personal and private life than my business background."

    A lawyer from Stroudsburg even went so far as to tell Peppard that her hourly wage would be determined by her marital status. He explained that married women have health insurance through their husband's jobs, and that he would have to pay more for benefits if he hired single women. To compensate, he paid single mothers less than other women. Despite her protest that such discrimination must be illegal, he told her it most certainly was legal. As Peppard learned, a weak Pennsylvania Human Relations law, most of it written in 1955, only recommends but doesn't require employers not to ask questions about marital status and if applicants have children.

    In 18 of 20 job interviews in Pennsylvania, Peppard was asked personal and sexist questions; both employers who didn't ask such questions—first Stroudsburg Areas School District then East Stroudsburg University—hired her on her qualifications. "The primary concern of the other employers," says Peppard, "was my personal and private home life not my business background or competence."

    The day Kiki Peppard had argued with the owner of the manufacturing company was also the day she decided the law needed to be changed. That was in 1995. She's still working to change the law.

PART 2

    "Are you married?"

    "Are you interviewing me for a job or asking me out on a date?"

    Kiki Peppard, of Effort, Pa., had long since stopped being polite when employers asked her questions that were not only irrelevant to her job application, but which should have been illegal as well. Such questions about family status were illegal in New York where Peppard had worked more than 20 years as a secretary, bookkeeper, and administrative assistant. They weren't illegal in Pennsylvania. With persistence, Peppard convinced the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission that change was necessary. But, it wouldn't be the Commission that would write the proposed legislation.

    And so Kiki Peppard became a lobbyist. "What these employers did to me," she says, "I didn't want them to do to anyone else." For more than seven years, Peppard has been telling "anyone who'd listen" about her interview experiences. "Most are shocked such practices are allowed," says Peppard, "and many have told me they have experienced the same problems." But, she knew change wouldn't come from information and education, but from an amendment to the Human Relations Act, written in 1955.

    Between 1995 and 1998, Peppard wrote to 90 Pennsylvania legislators and other elected officials, some of them twice, each time with new information. Only seven state legislators, says Peppard, replied. Rep. Joe Battisto (D-Tannersville), who later said he would "gladly co-sponsor this most important legislation" to amend the state act, referred Peppard's complaint to State Rep. Robert E. Nyce (R-Wind Gap) who represented Peppard's district. In a letter of September 1996, Nyce claimed that the issue was "complicated because of many sub-issues, such as freedom of speech, on which it encroaches." Peppard says she certainly couldn't see how prohibiting discrimination violated the Constitution. Nevertheless, Nyce said he'd ask the Labor Relations Committee "to look into this issue on your behalf for possible action in the next legislative session." Nyce, who was running for state auditor general and admits that staff persons may have responded in his name to many constituent letters, was in the last two months as a state representative. The issue was moot.

    A couple of state representatives even said they would vigorously oppose any anti-sexism legislation. With one representative, Peppard actually got into a 10-minute shouting match on the telephone. "He said he agreed that obtaining information about marital status was important in determining who to hire," Peppard remembers. "He said that employers needed the freedom to determine their own rules of whom to hire."

    One representative from the Allentown area wrote Peppard that women "would be better served by an amendment to federal law that would govern employers nationwide on a uniform basis." Only 19 states currently forbid employers from asking such personal questions. U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said it wasn't a federal problem and suggested Peppard seek redress at the state level.

    "I was frustrated," says Peppard. "It just seemed so obvious that this was blatant discrimination, and nothing was being done."

    In Spring 2001, Rep. Craig Dally (R-Nazareth), who now represented her district, introduced legislation to amend the archaic Human Relations Act. Dally, says Peppard, was the first and only representative "willing to put pen to ink on this issue." HB 1718, with 30 co-sponsors, was referred last June to the 24-member House State Government Committee, chaired by Rep. Paul Clymer (R-Sellersville). The state's Human Relations Commission in September sent a strongly worded letter to Clymer, supporting legislation and arguing, "There is no valid reason for an employer to discriminate against someone on the basis of marital or familial status." Two weeks later, Peppard sent Clymer a four-page letter by mail, fax, and e-mail. She says she never received a reply.

    What Clyner did do, however, was to ask one of the state's largest lobbying groups, the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce and Industry, to ask its members what it thought about such legislation. "We are still gathering member input," says Ty McCauslin, the Chamber's promotion manager.

    "The responses of those surveyed should be made public," says Peppard, "so women can determine which businesses discriminate against women in the workplace so we can make a careful consideration of whom we will do business with."

    Rep. Sara Steelman (D-Indiana) says adamantly that to continue to allow employers to discriminate based upon marital or familial status "seems to me like something right out of the Dark Ages."

    Sen. Jane Clare Orie (R-Pittsburgh) while a member of the state's House of Representatives had supported the proposed legislation. Now a state senator, Orie introduced a companion bill in the Senate (SB 1261, with six co-sponsors). That bill was assigned in January to the Senate's Labor and Industry Committee. In a letter to Rep. Clymer sent the day the Senate bill went to committee, Orie urged Clymer to move the proposed legislation out of his committee to allow a vote by the full House. Orie pointed out that having "spoken to hundreds of women" that discrimination based upon marital or familial status "appears to be very common in our Commonwealth."

    Eight months after the bill languished in the House committee, Clymer says he will probably call for a public hearing within a couple of weeks after the Legislature reconvenes, March 11. He says it's important to know "how many are affected, if this is a serious problem" that needs to be corrected by legislation, and what support and opposition such legislation would have. "When you have a public hearing," says Clymer, "it becomes informational and educational."

    It is appalling that such an obvious problem could exist for so many years, and be accepted as just another fact of life. It is disgraceful that one citizen has had to fight for seven years to bring the problem to the attention of the legislature, the public, and the media. It should be intolerable that legislation to correct the problem could lay in committee so long and possibly die had not one woman fought so vigorously. But, most of all, although a public hearing will show the widespread problems caused by employer ignorance, it is intolerable why legislation to ban discrimination and sexism even needs to have public hearings. The problem should be so self-evident that 203 representatives and 50 senators shouldn't even have to put their fingers in the air to wonder what the public thinks.

    March is Women's History Month. Perhaps it would be a tribute to the state's citizens for Pennsylvania's politicians—and those of the other 30 states which still allow sexist questioning in job interviews—to cancel their requisite photo ops with women, to make no more vacuous statements about how much they admire, appreciate, and support women, but do something important and vote to further eliminate state-sanctioned sexism.

Copyright 2002 Walter M. Brasch