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American Morning

When FBI Whistle-blower Took Hot Seat, She Joined Sherron Watkins

Aired June 07, 2002 - 07:21   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: When FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley took the hot seat yesterday on Capitol Hill, she joined another recent whistle-blower, Sherron Watkins in the Enron scandal. The two women were both following in the footsteps of another woman, Anita Hill, who went before Congress 11 years ago and accused the Supreme Court nominee of sexual harassment. And she wrote in an op-ed piece yesterday, "Ms. Rowley and Ms. Watkins are two women who rose through the ranks of male dominated institutions to become insiders. As whistle-blowers, they expressed certain values and had the conviction to act on values that were apparently in conflict with those of the leaders in their institutions."

And Anita Hill is now a professor of policy law at Brandies University. She joins us this morning from Watertown, Massachusetts.

Good to see you. Welcome.

ANITA HILL, LAW PROFESSOR, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY: Thank you. Good to be here.

ZAHN: I wanted to share with our audience now another small part of that op-ed piece which I think really reinforces the heart of what you were trying to communicate here. You wrote, "Is it a coincidence that the whistle-blowers in what may turn out to be the most significant examples of government incompetence and corporate wrongdoing in our time are women? I don't think so."

So are you basically saying it still takes a woman to clean a house here?

HILL: Well, I'm not sure it takes a woman. But I do think that the experiences of this, these two women and the context in which they were working played into their being able to come forward and actually act on their convictions to complain about incompetence and mismanagement in their respective institutions.

ZAHN: Were they able to do that because even though they had risen through the ranks of the male hierarchy, in essence, they were still outsiders?

HILL: Well, I think in some ways they must have felt themselves outsiders, especially when they started to realize that their own sense of values of what was right and wrong were clearly in conflict with the leadership at the FBI and at Enron. But, yes, they were able to rise through the ranks of these institutions despite histories of sex discrimination within the industries that they had worked, and particularly the FBI.

ZAHN: And we should probably point out that both of these women worked for traditional institutions. How did that affect their ability to blow the whistle?

HILL: Well, I'm not, I think it probably made it harder for them to blow the whistle. However, what I was trying to get at in the piece is the fact that in these traditional institutions even though women may advance to become high ranking or to positions of authority and status, that there is something that they bring with them, something about their own personal experiences and something about the way that they read the context in which they work that allows them, or maybe even urges them, to move forward and try to make changes in those institutions and to bring about reforms in those institutions.

And I think if you look back at the documentation, the memos that each of these two individuals wrote to the leadership of their workplaces that what they were trying to do, very clearly, was to institute change in policies and structures that they thought were either unethical or that were harmful to the institutions themselves.

ZAHN: I think it's interesting to note that Coleen Rowley in her testimony yesterday had some pretty pointed things to say about what it's like to stake out a career in a traditional place like the FBI and how there are many disincentives along the way to speak up.

We're going to listen to a small part of that testimony now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COLEEN ROWLEY, FBI AGENT: We have a culture in the FBI that there's a certain pecking order and it's pretty strong. And it's very rare that someone picks up the phone and calls a rank or two above themselves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: And then what she went on to say is basically the theory is don't rock the boat because that can affect your ascension in the corporation. That's a pretty common dilemma, isn't it?

HILL: I think it is a common dilemma and it's a common dilemma for women as well as men. But what I think we have to ask ourselves in this particular context, when we have the fact that both, in both of these highly popular or highly exposed situations where you've got two big scandals and you have two women who are the ones who have come forward and brought us information, what we have to ask ourselves is is it a coincidence that you, that the whistle-blowers are women? And I think that if you look at the entire situation, you realize that it's not a coincidence. There are a variety of things that might explain it, but one of the things, I think, is that women experience their workplaces in these traditional settings differently. These two women may not have experienced sex discrimination themselves, but they could, they had to be aware of it in the particular places that they were involved in. The FBI has had a history of sex discrimination complaints brought against it, as well as race discrimination. The oil industry or industry, energy industry has also been accused of being very male dominated and very male oriented.

And I can't help but believe that this came into play when these two women came forward, meticulously documented their complaints and tried to institute change from within.

Ultimately they found that it was not possible to change their institutions from within and they had to go outside.

ZAHN: All right, well, Anita Hill, we really appreciate your joining us so we could better understand the message of that piece in the "New York Times." Appreciate very much your dropping by on AMERICAN MORNING.

HILL: Thank you.

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