THE ADMINISTRATION: Attacking the 'Old Boy Network'

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The disappointment, perhaps, was inevitable. During the campaign, Jimmy Carter had hotly wooed the female vote by vowing "to bring far more women" into top levels of Government. But how many were enough to satisfy the passions such a promise aroused? Last week, as his second month in office ended, women were assessing Carter's performance and deciding that it fell well short of his declarations. Says Karen DeCrow, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW): "Women's rights are simply not a high priority of this Administration."

In its defense, the White House argues that it has given more good jobs to women than any previous Administration. No other President had more than one woman Cabinet member; now there are two—Commerce's Juanita M. Kreps and HUD's Patricia Roberts Harris. Carter has named two women as Under Secretaries (compared with Ford's one), 15 as Assistant Secretaries or officials of equivalent rank (four for Ford). In the Executive Office of the President, there are five female officials at "level 4 or over," a bureaucratic classification denoting jobs paying at least $50,000. Ford's White House had two.

All Men. But Carter's boast that he has tripled the number of women in top posts is shrugged off by Jane McMichael, executive director of the National Women's Political Caucus. Says she: "Three times nothing is still nothing." Women hold only 18% of the policymaking jobs in the Carter Administration—29 out of 154 posts—and that percentage is substantially affected by the Commerce Department, where Secretary Kreps has selected women for five of the 14 top-ranking jobs. Elsewhere, the record is much worse. HUD's Harris has included two women among the nine people she has selected so far. At Defense, women hold two of the 16 filled positions, and Interior is in the process of naming its first female.

When she was sworn in as Commerce Secretary, Kreps tartly informed the President in front of TV cameras that there were plenty of talented women and "we have to do a better job of looking." Carolyn Shaw Bell, an economics professor at Wellesley College and campaign adviser to Carter, charges that the Administration's proclaimed program to find qualified women is nonexistent. Says she: "Carter has a staff recruiting people, and they are all men. What you find to recruit all depends upon who is doing the looking."

Carter's critics claim that his male recruiters—consciously or unconsciously—exercise a familiar double standard when they consider women: to be hired, a female candidate has to be much more qualified than a male. Carter's aides argued against giving a job to Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan because she had no administrative experience. But the talent hunters were willing to overlook similar gaps in the backgrounds of some men who were tapped. Although he was a top staff man for Lyndon Johnson, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano had never managed anything but his desk before becoming the boss of 145,700 people in his current post.