June 3, 1994 CHAIRMAN REED E. HUNDT SPEECH BEFORE THE 1994 CONVENTION OF AMERICAN WOMEN IN RADIO AND TELEVISION MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA This year's convention theme, "Advancing Leadership and Change: Break Out of the Box," is timely because we are in the midst of extraordinary change in the communications industry. Men and women in their personal and work lives are called upon to show new leadership and to accommodate new forces of change. Similarly, the businesses of the communications sector are in the throes of change. This means breaking out of the regulatory and economic "boxes" in which they have been for many years. The opportunities for all Americans will be tremendous and that's what I most want to talk about with you today. The most profound changes in communications come from the technological convergence of our delivery systems. We have in this country five great and parallel means of delivering information and communication: broadcast TV and radio; telephones; cable; satellite; and wireless telephones. All these delivery systems are on the verge of converting to digital technology. In communicating via digitized means, voice, video and data merge so that satellites may provide cable TV or mobile telephony; telephone systems may also deliver cable TV; and the coaxial cable system may also deliver telephone services. In short, we now have the opportunity to encourage competition among all of our delivery systems. The information highway is not, and need not be, one road. It can be a multi-lane race, with many vehicles competing to deliver programming, data, telephone calls and interactive services. The benefits of competition are historically proven. Competition has always lowered prices, improved service and stimulated economic growth. It will do so in communications. The FCC has many opportunities to promote competition. For example: * Competition among video providers causes us to examine issues such as our broadcasting ownership rules. We are now looking at possible changes in our television ownership rules; * Our cable rules are designed to promote competition. For example, our program access rules ensure that competitors to cable, such as Direct Broadcast Satellite and wireless cable, are able to get access to the programming they need to compete effectively; * Later this year, the Commission will jump start a new competitor in the mobile telephone industry -- also called personal communications services, or PCS. This new industry will be a competitor to both cellular and, possibly, local telephone providers. As a framework for competition, we have three principles: choice, opportunity and fairness. Choice means choice for consumers and suppliers. It means you can go to more than one seller for telephone services or cable TV. Fairness means it isn't fair for a single company to charge whatever it wants to monopolized consumers. Opportunity means that competitive markets will create more opportunities to participate in this key part of our economy. Women must have greater opportunities in both ownership and employment. As I'm sure you know, the Commission compiles data from the Annual Employment Reports that broadcasters and cable operators are required to file under our Equal Employment Opportunity rules. Let me talk first about employment. The 1992 national labor force included 45.4% women. Our latest report, covering the years 1988 to 1992, showed, in broadcasting, female representation at 39.5% overall, and in broadcast management in 1992, only 33.8%. In cable, total female employment is 41.8%, and in management is only 36.3%. All these statistics are below the percentage of women in the national labor force. In the telephone industry the statistics are better. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics research, women are 48.5% of the common carrier labor force, and according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's statistics, women represented 42% of telephone company management in 1992. The numbers aren't bad, but the FCC has not before examined female employment in common carriers. I am going to change that, and we're going to double check these other agencies' work. When you look at these statistics, you can understand why we have in place EEO rules that foster the recruitment, hiring and promotion of women, as well as minorities. A month ago, the Commission imposed a forfeiture on a radio station for failure to recruit and hire women as required by the broadcast EEO rules. We hadn't fined a broadcaster for failure to recruit and hire women since 1988. I don't know what accounts for six years of no fines for this issue. But as Chair, I do intend to make sure that the absence of fines in this area does not mean the absence of compliance with our EEO rules. In order to promote the employment of women in the communications industry, we must focus on issues that apply generally to women in the workforce. For example, there must be opportunities for women who want to work part-time. Child care must be available and affordable. Telecommuting can help accommodate the needs of women in the work force. These steps need to be taken not only in industry, but at the Commission. We have allowed employees to adopt a flexible work schedule ("flextime") which allows them to start their work day as early as 7 o'clock and leave by 3:30 or to start at 10 o'clock and leave at 6:30. We also allow employees to work part-time -- between 16 and 32 hours per week. In addition, we allow job sharing -- one employee works mornings, the other afternoons; or one employee works from Monday morning through noon Wednesday and the other works from noon Wednesday through Friday. And on a more personal note, I know you know the chairperson of anything gets in trouble when he fails to follow his advisers' directions. I always do what I'm told and the people who do the telling, my Senior Legal Advisor and two Special Assistants, are all women. In addition, it was my honor to appoint a woman to head the Cable Services Bureau, only the second female bureau chief of the FCC ever. It is also a great pleasure to serve as Chair of a Commission that as of last week includes two women, Commissioners Rachelle Chong and Susan Ness, both of whom I had the honor to swear-in. When I arrived at the FCC six months ago, I discovered that the Commission had not gathered any figures on the number of women that own communications businesses. We are going to change that. But based on our inquiries with the major communications trade associations, we found the following. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association has 44 board members; all are men. The National Cable Television Association has 31 board members; one is a woman. The United States Telephone Association has 45 board members; two are women. Finally, the National Association of Broadcasters has 63 board members; 5 are women. I've got nothing against men, but come on. Of course, it's fairly likely that the percentage of women in ownership among businesses represented by these associations is no higher than the percentages on these boards. Of course I've had and will have in my job the great pleasure of working with many of the women who are leaders in the communications industries. I'm thinking, for example, of women like Fox Broadcasting Company's Chairman Lucie Salhany, Discovery Channel's President Ruth Otte, USA Network's Founder and President Kay Koplovitz, and Shamrock Television's President Diane Sutter, the recipient of the 1994 AWRT Achievement Award. I know that for these and so many other women in communications, the story of their careers has been a story of rebutting prejudice, overcoming stereotypes, and repeatedly being "first" - - the first women to do the many things that were part of their progress along life's path. In a recent magazine article on Washington's most powerful women, Ruth Otte talked about an early job she had doing market research. She remembered, "the assumption that you take notes in the meeting, you get the coffee; he gets the raise because he has a family and you're single." Ruth Otte left that job to work in an emerging new industry, cable, where these assumptions might not be so prevalent. When Otte arrived at Discovery, the fledgling cable network had 27 employees and 156,000 subscribers. Within three years she had helped build an organization with five times as many employees, and that had 50 million subscribers before its fifth birthday. Lucie Salhany began her television career as a secretary at WKBF- TV in Cleveland. At 23, she became the TV station's program manager. When she became the head of Fox Broadcasting in January 1993, she became, according to some press reports, the most important woman in broadcasting. Almost all firsts are difficult and painful. And almost all firsts are major accomplishments. Not quite all -- for example, I owe my job to hard work and a perspicacious vision of the interrelationship between antitrust, my expertise at my old law firm, and communications. But just coincidentally, I am also the first person in history to go to high school with the Vice President and to law school with the President. Some firsts are just plain lucky. But for women in the communications industry I think we all look forward to the era of no more firsts -- the time when equal opportunity means women in many jobs at all levels. A major new opportunity now is in PCS. Analysts estimate that competition in the wireless industry could generate 100 million subscribers within 10 years; that's 84 million more customers than now subscribe to cellular service. In this new business there is opportunity for women to enter ownership ranks as never before possible. The legislation permitting us to auction the radio spectrum for services such as PCS asked us to ensure that small businesses, women and minorities have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this exciting new technology -- owning systems, selling the services, building the systems, doing the marketing, and handling the repairs. There are many differing views on how we can ensure that women, minorities and small businesses get those opportunities. We haven't come to a decision yet about the means to give these opportunities. But here's what we want. First, in five years we want PCS ownership to look more like America than communications ownership now does. Sixty-four percent of the country is women and minorities. Only 1 or 2% of communications ownership is women and minorities. We can't close that gap entirely by just the PCS auction but we ought to be able to improve the picture. Second, we aren't going to give guarantees of success. We want to extend a helping hand, not give a handout. So we are focusing on opportunities to win auctions, not guarantees of being awarded a license. I don't think there's a more exciting part of our economy where women can seize opportunity than in communications. According to polls, 87% of all Americans get their news from radio and TV. You work in a medium more influential than any other. Two-thirds of all Americans say they don't know what the "information superhighway" is; yet the idea is so interesting that three-quarter say they welcome it. The information superhighway is too important for Americans to continue to be uninformed about what it is. You have the opportunity to educate them. And when you're telling the news about the information highway, you can tell the people that 45 million Americans work and play every day in buildings largely cut off from the modern information age. These are our children in schools, kindergarten through grade 12. In only half of the classrooms are there computers and in only 4% of the classrooms are the computers connected to telephone lines. Thus, only one out of 25 classrooms has the opportunity to connect to the communications revolution. President Clinton has called for us to connect all classrooms, libraries and health clinics to the information superhighway by the end of the decade. Legislation sponsored by Senator Hollings and Congressmen Dingell, Markey and Fields would ensure that the President's goal is met. Some telephone and cable companies already have accepted the President's challenge. Difficult issues of interconnection, standards setting, and tariffing for schools will have to be debated. But if we all agree to ensure opportunity for all Americans, especially our children, these issues can be resolved. And the rewards will be great. Building the information highway to the classroom means giving opportunity for participation in our economy to all children. It means giving all the tools of learning to the next generation. The communications revolution started at least two generations ago and will continue for future generations. One of its founders was Alexander Graham Bell, who was born on March 3. As it happens, that's my birthday, too. This coincidence is not why I'm Chairman of the FCC -- I've already explained the coincidence that accounts for that event. But a person much more important to me personally even than Alexander Graham Bell also shares my birthday -- my daughter Sara. When Sara enters kindergarten this year, she should be on the information highway that her birthday buddy Mr. Bell helped start -- but she won't be. I hope we connect her classroom and all classrooms to the networks soon. Indeed, my full dream is that as a senior citizen, gray and stout, I will sneak into the back at your convention of the future and listen to my Sara, a woman employed in the great communications industry, speak to you about whatever is rolling on the information highway of the twenty-first century. Of course, Sara will choose her own career. But if, like so many Americans in the future, she is involved in the communications revolution, she won't be the first women in my family to have seized that opportunity. I want to tell you about that "first" in my family. In 1930, my father was nine years old. He lived with his parents in an apartment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, next to the zoo. When the windows were left open on summer nights he could hear the elephants trumpet, or so he told me. Then his father died, leaving my grandmother not only a widow, but unemployed and without skills in the depths of the Depression. My father's childhood and his future were imperiled. But the communications revolution of that time gave my grandmother a job opportunity. She became a switchboard operator. That's how she put food on the table. And that's how she sent her son to college. A generation later, my father, because of his education and the good job it gave him, was, along with my mother, a teacher, able to give me the fine schooling and the training that I need every bit of to try to do my current job well. My grandmother was the "first" person in my family to participate in the communications revolution. If we commit now to vigorous competition in communications, we will see that the opportunity she had is created again and again for women and men in today's America. And in the future, as with my grandmother in the Depression, somewhere, some mother will be able to make ends meet, will fulfill herself, will raise a family, because of the communications revolution. That is the highest goal of the communications revolution today. This is the reason to build the information highway to my daughter Sara's classroom. That revolution, that highway, means opportunity for women and men who would otherwise not have it. I hope you will work with me to achieve that goal. Please help and help each other create that opportunity not only for those in this room but for the next generation. Thank you.