Florida has received a Plaintiff Travel Grant for our 2000 State convention. The plaintiff is Dr. Cynthia Fisher of Highland, New York

Dr. Cynthia Fisher, a biology professor at Vassar College, sued the college for sex discrimination in the denial of tenure in 1987. She alleged that the tenure denial was due to the fact that she was an older, married woman who had taken an eight-year break from the laboratory to raise her children. She cited statistics that showed some single women succeeded in the sciences but that women with children were often denied tenure.

In 1993 the trial court ruled in her favor, finding that Vassar had an intent to deny tenure to married women in the hard sciences. Fisher was awarded $626,872 and reinstated at Vassar. In September 1995, an appeals court overturned the decision, establishing a precedent that allows universities to consider the tenure candidate's absence from academia in their decisions. In June 1996, the federal appeals court reconsidered and upheld its original ruling. Fisher then appealed her case to the US Supreme Court which denied to hear her case.

The lower court's decision that is thus left standing makes extremely bad law for working women by allowing colleges to consider a faculty member's time off for child rearing in making tenure decisions. LAF awarded $15,000 in support of Dr. Cynthia Fisher's case.

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