SUSAN HAACK
The Best Man for the Job May be
a
Woman.
..
I recall, about a quarter of a century ago now, a job interview at which the
chairman opened the proceedings by assuring me he had nothing against
the employment of married women, he thought they might be quite good
for the women students. I told him-vamping it up just a little-that,
actually, I'd hoped to be good for the men (too). And that, naturally, was
that. Was I the bes t person for the job? I don't know. But I could tell you
a dozen such stories; and I'm pretty sure that at least once, yes, I was.
Still, by the time my temporary position at a woman's college came to
an end, I had landed a real, tenure-track job--in a recently-founded uni–
versity which as I recall then had about 300 faculty, of whom eight
(including me) were women. Why were we so few? Sometimes the best
candidate didn't get hired because of that reluctance to hire women I had
encountered earlier; but some talented women found the geography
impossible given a husband's career plans; some got discouraged at the
graduate school stage; some never got to that stage because of discourage–
ment from teachers or parents or peers. Doubtless, also, some women got
discouraged from, or in, graduate school because they suspected they
would encounter that reluctance, and some of the reluctance resulted from
the belief that a woman would leave
if
her husband had an opportunity
elsewhere. This was a pity; talented women were losing out, and universi–
ties were losing out too.
Is affirmative action a good solution to the kinds of problems I have
described? The term seems to be used of a range of policies, from requir–
ing that all reasonable steps are taken to ensure that women are not
discouraged from applying and that procedures are fair, to requiring, overt–
ly or by implication, that sometimes a woman be preferred even though she
is not judged the best applicant. Though probably there are mixed and
borderline cases, one can mark a key distinction by speaking of procedural–
fairness policies, on the one hand, and preferential hiring policies, on the
other. I assume it is not necessary to argue the desirability of the former;
it is the latter kind of policy that generates all the excitement.
When the best candidate fails to get the job for no other reason than
that she is a woman, that is, certainly, a bad thing; as I was moved to argue
