Lobbyists in State Capitol : These Women Take Up Issues, With All Things Being Equal

Once a month when the Legislature is in session, a group of Sacramento’s most powerful lobbyists meets privately for lunch at a popular Chinese restaurant near the state Capitol--and the only men allowed are the waiters.

All 30 or so of the lobbyists are women, some of them with six-figure salaries who represent blue-chip clients. Women legislators, whose votes the lobbyists seek to influence, also attend the luncheons.

The existence of “Women in Advocacy,” only 4 years old, underscores the growing importance of female lobbyists, whose ranks have tripled in the last 10 years.

They range from articulate, $100,000-a-year single women in their 30s and 40s who have previously worked for the Legislature, to a 72-year-old veteran who collects $7,000 a year, plus Social Security benefits, for representing a poor folks constituency.

Get the Same Sore Feet

The women insist that they lobby exactly the same way men do, get the same sore feet from running around the Capitol buttonholing lawmakers--and resent speculation that their sex appeal helps them round up votes from male legislators.

One woman lobbyist recalled what happened when she attended her first Senate committee hearing in the early 1970s:

“Within the first five minutes, the chairman had dispatched a sergeant-at-arms to ask me out to go out to dinner with him that night. This terrified me. And I didn’t come back to Sacramento for a month.”

These days, male lobbyists and male lawmakers alike generally agree with the observation of Jay Dee Michael, a longtime advocate for the California Medical Assn., who said: “Most women lobbyists I know are very professional and very competent. The feminine charm factor is overrated by people who don’t know what lobbyists really do.”

Veteran lobbyist Les H. Cohen said: “I don’t think any woman lobbyist is successful who doesn’t have talent. It’s too competitive up here. Women lobbyists have upgraded the image of the corps--and I’m not talking about looks either.”

The women lobbyists’ luncheons started four years ago when they decided that a monthly forum was needed to compare notes.

Although no men have been allowed at the luncheons except for the waiters, Jeanette E. Bunch, the president who lobbies for the San Diego Gas and Electric Co., said she expects that a coeducational policy probably will be adopted early next year. “The time has come,” Bunch said for male lobbyists and/or legislators to be admitted if they want to be.

By contrast, the Derby Club, a decades-old weekly luncheon group made up of male lobbyists and legislators, admitted its first woman member in 1979. It now boasts more than a dozen female members.

Arleta R. Carpenter, a $100,000-a-year lobbyist for the firm of Carpenter, Zenovich and Associates, said she was subjected to “quite a bit of sexual harassment” when she first started lobbying for the San Francisco city schools back in the early 1970s.

“But I was younger and less experienced and probably a whole lot more attractive then,” Carpenter said. “Plus, it was a different kind of Legislature in those days. Things have changed. Legislators now are more serious about their legislative goals. I just don’t think there is that magnitude of a sexual harassment problem for women lobbyists anymore.”

She is married to her current boss, former Orange County Republican Sen. Dennis E. Carpenter, and also is a former aide to a GOP assemblyman.

Kathleen Snodgrass, who also earns around $100,000 yearly working for the firm of Jackson/Barish and Associates, said: “I don’t think women lobbyists use their sex appeal to their advantage any more than men do. I think men lobbyists use their sex appeal on members, too.”

Snodgrass worked as legal counsel to Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) until two years ago.

Lobbyist Norma J. Dillon of Paul Priolo and Associates, headed by a former Southern California Assembly GOP leader, said that “only a few” women lobbyists date male legislators but declined to give any details.

“I don’t think the dating game has any significant impact on what goes on here regarding the legislative process,” said Dillon, who also is paid $100,000 a year.

“I think women are good for lobbying. And it will get even better as more women get into public office. But there never will be an old girls network because women don’t want to consider getting old.”

Queried if men legislators ever made passes at her, Sarah A. Bessera of George R. Steffes Inc., considered to be one of the best lobbyists by some of her peers, said: “No. They may joke in a kidding way, but that’s all in the game. I can joke back. That’s something I have developed. You have to have a sense of humor in this job. I couldn’t survive without a sense of humor.

Not Based on Looks

“I have my own personality. I have my own style. I don’t deny getting a vote because I am Sarah Bessera once in a while, but I don’t think I have ever gotten a vote because I am good-looking--if I am.”

Her employer, Steffes, is a former legislative lobbyist for then-Gov. Ronald Reagan. Bessera makes somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a year.

Among other clients, Bessera represents the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Assn. And her major victory this year, she said, was passage of a law to classify horse racing stable employees, such as hot walkers and grooms, as agricultural workers instead of entertainment employees. The goal of this statute was to reduce the amount of wage and hour paper work facing horse trainers.

“I beat the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO,” Bessera said with a grin.

Some male lobbyists still privately think that a woman lobbyist’s sex appeal can and does help her in her job.

“If an attractive woman lobbyist is on the other side,” said one male lobbyist, who asked not to be identified, “you wonder if a legislator’s decision has anything to do with that. You can never prove it or disprove it. But you always wonder.”

Marjorie C. Swartz of the American Civil Liberties Union may well have the heaviest workload of all women lobbyists because she tracks more than 1,000 bills each year and spends countless hours testifying before the Assembly Public Safety and Senate Judiciary committees. Swartz’s annual pay is $35,000 to $45,000, which is modest by lobbyist standards.

Likes to Win

“I’d like a job where I win more often and not have to fight the same old battles over and over again,” she admitted.

Her biggest disappointment this year was legislative passage of a bill requiring unwed minors to obtain parental consent or a judicial decree before having an abortion. “We hope to tie it up in the courts,” she said, “but who knows? We think it has serious constitutional problems.”

At the bottom end of the women lobbyists’ pay scale is Emma E. Gunterman, a 16-year lobbyist for the senior program of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, who makes $7,000 annually and collects Social Security.

“The Legislature would be dead in the water without lobbyists,” she said. “No matter how smart they are, they can’t know all there is to know about all of the issues. And we are there to tell them what they don’t know.”

Bunch, the president of the women lobbyists’ luncheon group, said that “to be a successful lobbyist, you have to know all of the facts (about a bill) and be able to convey those facts to a legislator. Of course, you lean the way you want the legislator to vote. But men lobbyists do that, too.”

Women lobbyists concede that there is one problem inherent with the job that plagues them more than it does their male counterparts. That problem is sore feet caused by constantly walking on the hard Capitol tile floors during their daily rounds of appointments, committee hearings and floor sessions.

Occupational Hazard

“Every woman lobbyist I know has some kind of a foot problem from wearing high heels all the time,” said Bessera, who takes acupuncture treatments. “It would be better if I wore jogging shoes, but I’m too vain to do that. Men lobbyists have the same kind of foot problems, but it’s not as bad because they don’t wear high heels.”

The dramatic growth in the number of Capitol women lobbyists is illustrated by pictures contained in the state directory that advocates put out.

Ten years ago, the directory included 47 pictures of women out of 561 legislative advocates, or 8.4% of the total. This year’s book contained 186 pictures of women lobbyists in a corps of 762 legislative advocates, or 24.4% of the total.

Why the big jump in the number of women lobbyists during the last decade?

Steffes, whose firm currently has three female and three male lobbyists, explained it this way:

“There were a lot of women consultants working in the Legislature. Some of them wanted to go out and get into private business in a related field. Lobbying was a ready market. When someone has been a staff person in the Legislature, what else are they going to do?

“No. 2, the qualifications of being a lobbyist are pretty esoteric and nebulous. There’s nothing that says you have to have a master’s degree in lobbying to be a lobbyist.

“And if you are going to pick a field, this has got to be one of the most accepting of women that I have ever seen because it is unstructured. Who knows what makes a good lobbyist? Special interests are much more accepting of (the idea that) a woman can do the job.”

Longtime lobbyist Cristina L. Rose noted that women traditionally have worked as volunteers in grass-roots politics--walking precincts, stuffing envelopes, licking stamps and answering telephones in election campaign headquarters.

Women in Business

“Women have entered all areas of the business world in greater numbers,” Rose said, “but it has been easier in the political arena. Volunteer work has led to easier acceptance of women lobbyists by legislators because they are used to working with them.”

It is not certain which woman has been lobbying the longest in the Capitol. Some say it is Gladys Sargeant of Pets and Pals, a group that advocates the spaying of dogs and cats to prevent overpopulation problems. Sargeant has been fighting this battle for more than 25 years and is still active.

“Most women lobbyists have gotten into the ranks the hard way,” Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles) said. “And they have to be better than men because it is a tougher world for them, I would suspect. They usually are very precise, have more information than they need, and are very well prepared.”

Assemblyman Lloyd Connelly (D-Sacramento) commented: “I can’t say there is a real difference between men and women lobbyists. All lobbyists are tough, aggressive advocates for their clients. I approach them all with a little bit of a Missouri ‘show me’ attitude, regardless if they are men or women.”