My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I came to M.I.T. in 1960, only 4 percent of the students were female. Today, it's about 40 percent of undergraduates. At Lincoln Lab, they had 1,000 men and two women. But we had a very good boss, and he treated us just like everybody else.
In 1969, when I graduated from Harvard Law School, women and minorities made up a tiny fraction of the first year associates accepted by top law firms.
I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home.
The reason there weren't any, I am surmising, is that a lot of Latin kids, Latino kids, in those days didn't have the money to take those kind of classes.
In science, technology, engineering and mathematics, men far outnumber women in the classroom and the boardroom.
I've had women come up to me and say I was the reason they went to law school.
As of the mid-90s, over 50 percent of women have a bachelor's and master's degree, compared to about 35 percent and 30 percent, respectively, in 1920.
I graduated with a class of 35 people. We had basically just enough people to actually have a play.
It's a huge change from when I started in the 1960s, but what is really impressive is that the number of ladies on set, the women working on set is a huge percentage. There used to be no women. It was just the leading lady's mother, perhaps the hairdresser and the makeup person.
The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.