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By Newsweek Editors
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In the winter of 1977 The New York Times ran an editorial called "The Complaints of White Men." The law had long favored white males, the editorial stated, but now, in the era of affirmative action, the law was at last bending to favor women and minorities. The editorial applauded the change, and noted that within the Times itself, "we have undertaken corrective measures ... to expand opportunity."
Well, sort of As Nan Robertson's eye-opening new book The Girls in the Balcony (274 pages. Random House. $22) makes plain, the editorial stance of one of the world's preeminent liberal newspapers had little to do with the policies in its newsroom. At the time of the editorial, women employees of the Times were engaged in a class-action suit charging the paper with systematic sex discrimination, and the evidence was dazzling. Women were being paid thousands of dollars less than similarly qualified men doing the same work. Marylin Bender, editor of the Sunday business section, made nearly $15,000 less than her male predecessor. As an assistant metropolitan editor, Grace Glueck had made up to $12,000 less than men holding the same job. Health columnist Jane Brody, one of the best-known writers at the paper, was making $100 per week less than the lowest-paid man in her department. Almost as repellent as the statistics was the day-today misogyny. When John Leonard was editor of the Sunday book review in the early '70s, he set out to fill two vacancies on the staff with women (novelist Toni Morrison was a prospect) but soon ran into a brick wall. Sunday editor Daniel Schwarz told him women were unreliable-they cried too much.
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Robertson, who was herself a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter and involved in the suit from the start, spares nobody. Some of the most famous names in American journalism are demolished in these pages, including James Reston, A. M. Rosenthal and Seymour Hersh. Soon after Leslie Bennetts, then 28, was hired as a reporter in 1978, she found herself in an elevator with investigative reporter Hersh, whose work she revered. He rode up silently, stepped out of the elevator then turned and snarled, "You know perfectly well you never would have been hired if it hadn't been for the women's suit, don't you!"
The women's suit was settled out of court in 1978, with the Times agreeing to a new affirmative-action plan and a payment of $350,000 toward legal fees and back pay. Since then its record in hiring and promotion has improved, but sexism didn't end with the settlement. Bennetts spent nearly 10 years as a Times writer before learning in 1987 that a newly hired man in her department was making $11,000 more than she was. (She got an excellent offer from Vanity Fair and quit.) And as recently as last spring the Times ran a profile of William Kennedy Smith's accuser in the Palm Beach case that was so full of tawdry (and gratuitous) detail that hundreds of staffers were outraged. According to Robertson, 13 female editors pushed for an Editor's Note apologizing for the story-and won.
Carefully and fearlessly reported, "The Girls in the Balcony" is an important document. Unfortunately, it's not a very good book. The text is poorly organized, clumsily written and longer than the story warrants. Robertson doesn't really have the material for a book here; what she has are the makings of a solid three-part series. Too bad she couldn't have published exactly that-in a serious newspaper of record like The New York Times.
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