Publisher’s Yellow Pages Put the Accent on Women

For a woman to make as much in a day as a man, she’d have to work until 10:30 at night--but then, who’d make dinner?

That one-liner is actually an advertisement.

It appears in a Yellow Pages listing for the American Assn. of University Women. But it doesn’t appear in just any Yellow Pages. It’s in the Los Angeles Women’s Yellow Pages which, in its feisty 10th year, continues to build a reputation on being unconventional.

“I’d like our directory to eventually be put out of business,” said Leslie Stone, the Los Angeles-based publisher who purchased the Women’s Yellow Pages for $3,000 seven years ago. “Ideally, there shouldn’t be a need for it,” she said, “but realistically, that may be a long time off.”

Until then, she’s making a tidy profit--some $60,000 last year--from the directory of businesses whose majority owners are women. What advertiser in their right mind would pay $400 for a quarter-page ad in a directory that is distributed almost exclusively to women?

Plenty.

In fact, more than 1,500 advertisers are in the 1988 edition released last week.

The most popular category: health. Women doctors, dentists and therapists are the biggest advertisers by far. “I know of one guy who bought the directory to find a female dentist,” said Mary Beth Gaik, marketing director. “He thought a woman dentist would be more sensitive to his fear of pain.”

The 175-page directory sells for $4.95 at bookstores, but the majority of its 20,000 copies are given free to female professional and women’s groups.

Since it was first published in 1977, nearly 50 other women’s directories have sprouted from Denver to London.

But the biggest surprise of all may be its effect on Omaha. Although seldom thought of as a bastion of feminism, Omaha is now home to two competing women’s directories.