Readers Report

WHO NEEDS TO KNOW WHAT AT THE JOB INTERVIEW

Regarding your review, "The pregnant silence in Corporate America" (Books, Mar. 9), it's quite obvious that the interviewer who "really needs to know" if the 22-year-old female applicant plans to have children would never hire a woman in any case.

So a better answer to his the interviewer's question might be: "Before I promise to work here forever, to forgo matrimony, parenthood, taking time off to write a novel, contracting debilitating illnesses--what I really need to know is if management has any plans to sell this paper to someone who might spin it off or close it down, leaving me jobless and pensionless when I'm too old to find comparable employment."

Author Felice Schwartz is living in a time warp of the 1970s and early 1980s. Recent events have shown that so-called corporate career tracks are easily superseded by other more powerful game plans. Young people entering the job market should just do what they have to do to get started and take care of their own careers. It has already been demonstrated that Corporate America isn't going to do it for them.

Marilyn Rosenfeld

New York