http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/41/features-wolf.php
Dean has spoken without notes, on this evening in March, for nearly an hour, and before taking questions, which he does genially for another 45 minutes, he tells a story, apropos the subject of affirmative action, that illustrates a key moment in his own personal connecting of the dots. (The lead-up to the Supreme Court decision on the University of Michigan’s admissions policies is still under way; Dean, with more vehemence than he’s brought to almost any subject tonight, has called Bush’s use of the word “quota” in reference to the case “revolting.”) Vermont’s judiciary is now almost 50 percent women, but when he first took office, Dean tells the group, the number was much lower. Although he was theoretically disposed toward appointing women judges, he discovered that, as recommendation cycles came and went, there were very few women on the lists of potential appointees. His chief of staff, on the other hand, is a woman; under Vermont law, she was in charge of all the hiring and firing of personnel for the governor’s office, and by the time a couple of years had passed, Dean says, the office had become “pretty much the definition of a matriarchy.” When the next vacancy occurred, he suggested that for the sake of diversity it might be a good idea to hire a ‰ man. His chief of staff agreed, then came in to talk to him about it a few days later, looking troubled. “‘Governor,’ she said, ‘there are just so few qualified men out there . . .’”
Dean laughs along with the crowd. “That’s when I realized,” he says, “that she’d been talking to her friends, the way you do when you’re looking to hire someone, and they’d been talking to their friends, and not surprisingly, they were mostly coming up with the names of other women. And that’s why we need affirmative action in this country. Human beings tend to be most comfortable with people like ourselves. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but when it comes to jobs and education, if there isn’t affirmative action, people will keep on choosing people just like themselves, and that cuts off a lot of opportunity — for society and for the people who don’t get picked.” What this situation makes necessary, he goes on, is a structured, compensatory effort at widening the pool — in Vermont it meant actively recruiting women to augment the submissions from largely white, male bar associations — until, over time, the other elements of “like us,” professional and educational and so forth, begin to click in.