She came face-to-face with a chemistry professor at Cornell University apparently vying for sexual favors.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was no stranger to sexual harassment and discrimination at the start of her prestigious law career.
The 84-year-old feminist icon from Brooklyn, speaking Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, reflected on the burgeoning success of the #MeToo movement, as well as her own brushes with harassment and gender inequality.
“Every woman of my vintage knows what sexual harassment is, although we didn’t have a name for it,” Ginsburg told her longtime friend, NPR’s Nina Totenberg, in Park City, Utah.
Ginsburg, clutching her microphone with both hands, said she grasped the seriousness of the abusive power collegiate men could have over women during her undergraduate studies at Cornell University in the 1950s. There, she came face-to-face with a chemistry professor apparently vying for sexual favors.
Supreme Court blocks court order to redraw N. C. congressional map
Ginsburg sought help from the teacher, realizing she was not confident about the subject matter. He offered her a practice exam and she took it, she told the audience.
“The next day, the test was the practice exam. I knew exactly what he wanted in return,” she said.
She had no legal options to strike back at the teacher so Ginsburg stormed into his office saying, “How dare you? How dare you do this?”
“And that was the end of that,” she said.
Supreme Court rules that Trump travel ban can take full effect
Another standout moment Ginsburg cited during her hour-long talk took place when she joined Rutgers University School of Law as a professor in 1963. The dean at the time told her that she would need to take a pay cut to work there.
“When he told me how much of a cut, I was astonished,” she said.
She asked what a male colleague with a similar education was earning. The answer, she learned, was that the other professor required a larger salary because “he has a wife and children to support.”
“You have a husband with a good paying job in New York,” she recalled the administrator saying.
Trump adds five firm conservatives to Supreme Court nominee list
The next year, the women of Rutgers filed an equal pay complaint, Ginsburg said. The school settled, doling out a $6,000 salary to the lowest paid employee and a larger bump for others.
She experienced another round of gender disparity when she was a young mother. The Columbia University graduate joined the Southern District of New York as a clerk, assuming the judge wanted to make the judicial world a better place for women.
However, this notion was crushed when she learned the truth behind her hiring in a law journal column penned by the teacher who recommended her for the job.
“The judge was hesitant. He said he had a woman law clerk and she was fine. But I had a 4-year-old child,” Ginsburg said. “He was concerned I couldn’t do the job, wouldn’t be there when he needed me because I would be taking care of my child.”
Sotomayor avoids discussing Trump’s comments about her health
Her professor made a deal that the judge couldn’t refuse — if Ginsburg didn’t meet the judge’s expectations, he would swap her with a male graduate.
“That was the carrot. The stick was, if you don’t give her a chance, I will never recommend another Columbia student to you,” Ginsburg said.
Speaking as women in cities across the nation flooded the streets to protest the anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration, Ginsburg said that she was glad the world has changed for the better.
She also spoke about the #MeToo viral movement encouraging women to come forward with stories of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of allegations against former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
“It’s about time,” Ginsburg said. “For so long, women were silent, thinking there was nothing you could do about it. But now the law is on the side of women, and men, who encounter harassment and that’s a good thing.”
Ginsburg attended Sundance to celebrate the debut of the “RBG” documentary about her career.
