‘Our Job Is to Try to Open Doors for Women’ : Activist Organization Seeks to Help Female Participants in Workshop Setting

Esther Chu, grandmother of three and women’s issues chair for the Claremont branch, American Assn. of University Women, was laying it on the line during a workshop at the California division’s fall conference: “Our job is to try to open doors for other women. This is what we’re all about. If you’re not about it, then you’re not a very good AAUW member.”

This is what AAUW has always been about but, in 1985, opening doors for other women means a great deal more than encouraging their higher, or continuing, education. It means backing legislation to protect latchkey children and to fund child care programs. It means working for pay equity (comparable worth) and for the equal rights amendment.

AAUW has gone “from the sterling to the Styrofoam,” said state president Carole Bovitz, a marriage and family therapist from Huntington Beach, who spoke of members “selling their silver and putting their money in our foundation so other women can go back to school.” And she told of AAUW branches, facing the triple reality of rising property taxes, escalating real estate values and changing meeting patterns, selling their clubhouses, as Los Angeles did, to benefit the foundation.

A Support System

“We’re mentoring, we’re (role) modeling,” Bovitz said. “We are a support system, and women need that.” AAUW is an activist organization, she said, though perhaps one that has been “in hibernation.”

The swing of the pendulum was completed, in Bovitz’s view, in 1972, the year that AAUW declared passage of the ERA as its No. 1 national priority. Traditionally, she noted, the 104-year-old organization, which at one time had been dominated by women in teaching, had been “so very cautious.”

Now, there may be more change coming. Bovitz, for one, is on record as in favor of opening AAUW membership to men and also doing away with the requirement of a four-year baccalaureate degree for eligibility.

“Invest in Yourself--Invest in the Future” was the theme for the fall meeting at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel last weekend. The 660 participants representing 140 of AAUW’s 184 California branches were offered a menu spiced with intellectual variety: Global issues such as peace, human rights violations and United Nations reform, close-to-the-pocketbook issues such as the wage gap.

There were workshops on the art of persuasion, on overcoming procrastination and on “Business on the Green: Winning Through Golf.” There was even an hour programmed in for aerobics.

In competition with Assemblyman Tom Hayden in a nearby meeting room, Barry Leskin, department chairman, management and organization, USC School of Business Administration, drew a good turnout for his workshop on the changing picture of women in the workplace.

His summary: “Movement is faster than it would occur by evolution, but not as fast as I would like it to be if I were a woman.”

Positive Signs

He cited as positive signs the response of business to the needs of dual career couples and increasing attention by business to demands for child care near the workplace.

But, Leskin said, women are to a degree being held back by themselves--by their “ambivalence around power,” their discomfort with dealing with conflict, for example: “Do you terminate a male or female who’s responsible for a child to save a few dollars?”

Although 90% of women of working age will be in paid jobs by the year 2000 (compared with 45% today), he said, “I just don’t see that many women in key operating positions who are going to move to the top in Fortune 500 companies.”

A tangible reflection of young America’s preoccupation with affluence, Leskin said, is the jump in the number of graduates getting their degrees last year in business and management--and a significant number of those graduates are women. Overall, he said, 23% of all graduates are in business and 42% of those are women. Twelve years ago, only 13.8% of degrees were awarded in the field and 10.8% of those went to women. That translates to 95,000 women business graduates in 1985, compared with 14,000 in 1973.

Nevertheless, he said later, “women will never get into power positions” through staff and middle management jobs, where they are clustered; it is from the “line” jobs, the day-to-day decision-making jobs, that the ladder leads to the office of the company president or chief executive officer.

Role Models Scarce

Why has the climb up that corporate ladder been so slow for women? Role models are scarce, for one thing, Leskin said, and “women have a great deal of difficulty being mentored by men,” largely because of men’s discomfort with the idea. “Some men,” he said, “will take someone wanting career help as an opportunity for sexual advance. Others are frightened of their own sexuality . . . and will back off.”

Nor does he see the emergence of an “old girls’ network.” He suggested, “Women are much harder on other women (than are men). Women have a tendency to set high standards . . . they don’t want to be seen as being easy on other women.”

What’s more, he said, is that, with an increasingly global economy and deregulation at home, big business is looking for ways to cut costs to stay competitive. “That,” he said, “doesn’t bode well. It is causing (them) to be less willing to train and develop minorities and women. That’s certainly true in manufacturing.”

The good news? In the last decade, Leskin said, the vast majority of the 12-million-plus jobs added to the economy have been in small to mid-sized companies where there are opportunities for women as entrepreneurs. He said he would expect to see “many more females starting their own companies,” largely in professional services such as accounting and property management.

The keynoter, Councilwoman Joy Picus, a one-time AAUW branch president in the San Fernando Valley, introduced herself as “a recycled woman, a term I learned in AAUW.” She was, she said “a traditional woman of the ‘50s” who followed the ‘50s pattern--college, marriage, three children. “I never knew that there was life after 40,” she said. “I did not know until I was 35 that women could hold public office.”

She had come to talk about pay equity, the concept of equal pay for jobs requiring similar skills even though one job category may be female-dominated, another male-dominated. “The President may call it a cockamamie idea and Clarence Pendleton, head of the Civil Rights Commission, may call it the looniest idea since ‘Looney Tunes,’ ” she said, “but within 25 years we’ll have equity.”

Citing poverty statistics for women heads of household, she said, “Women are poor because they work for less money.”

They are poor, too, she said, because they cannot get reasonable child care, because they increasingly are carrying the burden of caring for both young children and aged parents, because they are the economic victims of divorce and because they are discriminated against by insurance companies, pension plans and tax laws.

Don’t ‘Take Refuge’

She urged the AAUW women not to “take refuge” in their comfortable middle-class economic status, cautioning that a death or a divorce could put any one of them in the economic lower class. “There is so much left to do,” she said. “Get out there and do it!”

In a workshop earlier, Picus traced the development of what she termed the “precedent-setting” agreement reached in May whereby 3,900 women holding traditionally low-paying city jobs were brought to parity with city workers in comparable male-dominated jobs who were being paid 15% more. The cost to the city over a three-year period will be $12 million.

(Later, addressing the AAUW, Mayor Tom Bradley said he was “very proud to be part of that great struggle.” And, Bradley said, despite the Gov. George Deukmejian’s veto earlier this month of legislation that would have created a commission to evaluate 6,000 state job classifications to determine whether there is a pay gap between males and females, “We will not give up.”)

Panelist Esther Chu reminded her audience that many of the women living in poverty, laid off from their jobs, are “our women, our neighbors, our friends, our AAUW people. These are us. They’re you and they’re me.”

Chu said she isn’t buying the idea that some “men’s” jobs pay more because only men can handle them, noting that she was once told she couldn’t drive a diesel truck. “Poppycock,” she said. “You could run it with one finger. I’ve been able to drive a truck since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Just because you’re a senior citizen doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.”

Joan Shaffran-Brandt, legislative assistant to Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson, a Westside Democrat, was, however, astounded when a roomful of arms shot up in response to her query, “How many people here have ever written a letter to their elected official?” So few people do, she said, that “if we get 20 letters (on an issue) out of 525,000 (constituents) we start to wonder what’s going on.”

A workshop led by Bobbe L. Sommer, an educational psychologist based in San Clemente, and Gene Konstant, a partner in a Newport Beach-based firm that teaches businesses how to increase their profits, produced some provocative give-and-take.

Sommer, who had stated “the importance of keeping our femininity intact,” suggested during her presentation that asking a woman if she is a feminist is a loaded question, somewhat like asking a man, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

And it was, obviously, a question with which a number of women in that room hadn’t quite come to terms. Heads nodded in comprehension.

A young AAUW member from San Francisco had been hearing hints on climbing the corporate ladder but, she said, “I’m not interested in moving up ladders. I was scripted for career success by my parents.” She felt trapped, she said, especially since she was solely a career woman, neither a homemaker nor a wife.

Sommer replied that success is a very personal thing and suggested that she seek hers outside the corporate structure. Konstant said, “To try to be what everybody else wants me to be is maniacal.”

A young woman just entering the workplace, in a political staff job, said, “I find it’s really hard for me to be a professional and not give up my lipstick. . . . I was criticized for wearing red, for having my hair long. . . .”

Another young woman said, “I’m a pharmacist in a predominantly male pharmacy. I run into the problem of women 45 or 50 who haven’t had the educational opportunities I’ve had resenting the fact I’m the pharmacist on duty. They’ll say, ‘I want the man.’ ”

Sommer suggested that she tell those women firmly, “I’m qualified to assist you. Now, how may I assist you?”

A homemaker and part-time teacher said she was still struggling to find a good answer to those who asked her in social situations, “Do you work?” Konstant suggested as a reply, “Do I ever!”

Reared a Workaholic

Finally, a woman technical writer, married to an attorney and the mother of a teen-age son who shows signs of wanting to be a super-achiever, said she lived with the guilt that, having presented a superwoman role model for her son, she had reared a workaholic and she “wants to find some way to undo this.”

Said Sommer: “Even if you stopped in your tracks today and sat on your couch and ate bonbons and patted your poodle all day,” the die is probably cast and “it probably suits his personality style.” Konstant urged her not to “invalidate” her life for someone else.

AAUW points with pride to its Educational Foundation Program; the 190,000-member national organization each year gives more than $1 million in grants and fellowships to women. California women last year contributed $413,000, and 21 AAUW fellows are currently studying in this state. There are awards for study in the United States for women who promise to return to their countries and share their expertise and there are awards to re-entry women--widows, displaced homemakers--who have found that a college degree earned two or three decades earlier does not qualify them to make a living.

AAUW also funds community service projects, such as a hot line for latchkey children in Pennsylvania. And it provides money to encourage young women to enter such “non-traditional fields” as math and science. One of its fellowship recipients was astronaut Judith Resnik of Redondo Beach, who earned her Ph.D. on an AAUW fellowship.

“We’re not just a bunch of little old ladies who don’t know what to do with our money,” said president Bovitz.

Another astronaut, Dr. Anna Fisher, a San Pedro High School and UCLA Medical School graduate who became the fourth U.S. woman in space, came to talk to AAUW on Sunday.

Fisher is married to another astronaut-physician, Dr. William Fisher, and is the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Kristin.

Fisher, 36, one of 13 women in the astronaut program, brought along slides and films of her 17,000 m.p.h. journey through space on Discovery in November, 1984. In her vernacular, it was “neat.” How did she feel after returning to Earth after eight days of weightlessness? “Like a 1,000-pound gorilla.”

Later, Fisher, who is scheduled for another flight in June, talked about her future--”Depending upon career opportunities, I would like to stay with NASA. Women are just now getting the kind of experience where they can be considered for management positions. It’ll be very interesting to see what the next 10 or 20 years will hold.”

Higher visibility for AAUW (together with holding membership at about 30,000 statewide in a time when many groups are losing members) are major priorities with Carole Bovitz, the state president. She talks of male membership as something that’s “not far off” and of a two-year rather than a four-year degree as the eligibility requirement as a long-range change.

The latter is a change she favors, she said, because “anyone who’s interested in the issues and has the energy and enthusiasm” should be a good member.

The membership, however, is split on this issue. Rosellen Kershaw of Fresno, a 37-year member, said, “If we are promoting and supporting women going into higher education, we should be an example of that.”

There is some opposition within, too, to the notion of admitting men--at least until the ERA is passed.

When women at Saturday’s general session were asked to project where AAUW would be in 1995, one of the questions was, “Who do you want as your 1995 keynoter?” A voice rang out loud and clear from the audience: “How about the second woman President?” The room filled with cheers.