CONTACTS! : Successful Women Find Social, Professional Sustenance in All-Women’s Support Groups

As an insurance agent, Elizabeth Turner’s workplace was dominated by men. Her contact with women on the job was limited and not that invigorating. Then, when she left to form her own insurance company, a different sort of isolation set in.

“There was really no one to talk to at my level,” she said. “When I was working (as an agent) and there were other people who were my equals, I’d sit down in the office and chew the fat or go out to lunch or go out after work. But when I started working for myself, there was really no one to talk to. When I got employees, I couldn’t really talk to them. They didn’t get it. The guys I used to work with didn’t get it, because they thought I was crazy for going out on my own, anyway. So I became an outcast from them.”

What Turner needed was some good old-fashioned moral support--from someone who understood the travails of a woman starting her own business. Eventually she found it and, to her way of thinking, from a most unlikely source: other women.

“I wasn’t looking for women at all,” Turner said. “I’d never known any successful women. Then I met the people at Contacts and said, ‘Yeah!’ ”

Now the president of Contacts of Orange County, a group of about 35 women, Turner found what hundreds of other management-level and women business owners in Orange County now swear by: membership in women’s organizations.

With memberships ranging from about 20 to more than 100, the groups typically offer members a chance to meet other successful women, hear a wide range of guest speakers and compare notes about the rigors of being a woman in charge.

While they can provide practical help, such as business contacts, the groups also provide something akin to sanctuaries, many women say. Meeting once a month, the gatherings provide a place where women can let their hair down without being seen as unprofessional, where people realize that tears in the workplace aren’t a sign of weakness, where success doesn’t have to be apologized for, and where others instinctively knew about the juggling act of being a business executive and a wife and mother.

Betty Shaffer is an internal consultant in personnel staff development for the county. It is her third step up the ladder in county government, a ladder that she says has some slippery rungs. “I think there’s a perception out there that things are different now in the work world, that women have made so many strides that we’re accepted and that everything’s OK,” she said. “Certainly, we’ve made tremendous achievements in being accepted in the ranks, but the truth is there are still a lot of feeling there about women being in high-level positions.”

It was that problem--working in a male-dominated environment--that led Shaffer in search of a women’s group, and she joined Women in Business. “One-on-one, I’ve had some real friendships with men at work where they were supportive of me, where they did mentor me and . . . teach me the ropes, so to speak. But without sounding too simplistic, it’s difficult for men who have dealt in a male environment and know the game to understand what it’s like for women who are coming into the game and have to learn the rules. And some of those rules are not written down. Some are not shared with women . . . so you feel isolated, like, ‘There’s something I don’t know that everybody else knows.’ When talking to other women, though, you don’t feel so isolated. You say, ‘It’s not me; other people have felt that way.’ ”

It is that sense of shared experiences that women point to most often when discussing their organizations.

“Women don’t sit around and talk about being discriminated against,” said Sheila Ivary, president of the 160-member Women in Business. “It’s much more subtle than that. It’s a camaraderie, a shared experience that’s common to all of us.”

Especially with women who have attained executive or managerial positions, she said, there is an unspoken knowledge that most, if not all, have seen sex discrimination. “I don’t think that has gone away,” Ivary said. “It’s just very much underground. I’m not trying to sound martyr-ish or anything like that. It just takes a long time for society to change.”

Another key reason for the proliferation of women’s groups is a simple one: They’re a lot of fun.

“We can let our hair down a little bit,” said Sandy Huff, a vice president and part owner of Elizabeth Turner’s insurance company. She is also a past president of Contacts of Orange County. “We were all achievers, some at a very young age and, all of a sudden, you achieve so much and become successful, but you don’t play anymore. I think with our group we learned how to play again.”

Ivary used almost the same words in a separate interview. “If you’re playing a role and maintaining an image in the workplace, it’s nice to know there’s someplace to go and have some camaraderie and let your hair down a bit,” she said.

“I had a male friend who, sometimes when we’d go to a restaurant, he’d point out women sitting and talking. He’d say: ‘Look how involved those women are when they talk with each other.’ He said he didn’t think men had those kind of conversations. It’s not that they were talking about anything really important. It was a sense that they were really involved on an emotional level.”

It is not lost on these successful women that arguments of same-sex bonding were the same ones men made when women pushed for inclusion in all-male clubs. Today, some women are bemused by the comparison. “Women realize now what men’s organizations had done for men, why they were so important,” Huff said.

Hermina Morrison, also a member of Contacts, used to lobby against all-male organizations. When one finally asked her to join, she declined, having already found what she wanted in women’s groups.

“I’m as feminist as anyone else,” said Morrison, the business accounting manager at a Newport Beach firm. “I’m as liberated as anyone else, but I have no interest in finding support, per se, from a male organization.”

A member of Contacts of Orange County for five years, Morrison said: “When men get together, especially in organizations when they’re on a somewhat similar level . . . there’s a sense of a buddy system there, a friendship that develops over a period of time. It’s all well and good to try to do that with men and women at the same time, but women need the same as men do. We need to be with each other.”

Peggy Davis owns travel agencies in Orange and Santa Ana and is president of the county’s 60-woman chapter of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners. “We make it clear we’re not a networking group,” Davis said. “We’re there to support each other, because very few people support us.”

One of the main areas of support, Davis said, is the all-important “juggling act” that women in business practice constantly.

“It’s a 60-hour workweek, minimum,” for business owners, Davis said. “And women still have to manage the home, a lot are having to manage a husband and family in addition to devoting the hours (to work). We’re not like a man who can come home and put his feet up on the couch at night, and I admit it’s a tug of war.”

Davis has owned her business for four years. “I now understand how men tended to lose their families when they were in their 30s, really building their careers,” she said. “I’ve gotten so totally immersed in building my business that if I didn’t have a super-understanding family I’d have problems. I’ve watched it take its toll on women.”

Successful, driven women have it tougher than men, she said, because most still believe it’s their duty to maintain the family unit. “I think women think it’s their role, so they become very torn between: ‘Should I stay with this (business) or should I back off?’ ”

Women business owners are a rapidly growing constituency, Davis said, because “women found themselves stifled in the corporate business world. When I go to national meetings, most of the owners (say) the reason they’re in business was they felt stifled in corporate life and wanted to be their own bosses. . . . There’s still discrimination at the top; we’re not equal yet. I’d like to think we are, but we’re not.”

Susan Linn used to attend so many women’s organization meetings that she decided to list all of them in a book, entitled “Susan Linn’s Directory of Orange County Networking Organizations.” The women’s section lists nearly 50 organizations, including several that specify “support” for women as one of their main goals.

Statistics aren’t readily available on the extent of women-owned businesses in the county or the numbers of women in significant managerial positions. Several group leaders, however, said they had heard of a study that indicated Orange County trailed only Los Angeles nationally in the number of women “entrepreneurs,” an admittedly ambiguous designation.

“I think Orange County is a very social county and entrepreneurial county,” said Anne Kimbell Relph, president of Enterprising Women Inc., a group in which successful women entrepreneurs explain to fledgling women entrepreneurs how they did it.

Relph said the group has averaged 150 a month at breakfast meetings since last year. “I think the county is a place where it’s easy for people who have an idea to get other people interested in it,” she said.

Linn said the Orange County women’s organizations have proliferated in the past 10 years. They tend to resemble, in function and purpose, the men’s clubs that have historically been an unofficial part of the male-dominated corporate world.

“We get a laugh every once in a while and call it the good old girls network,” said Pat Powell, a past president of Charter 100, a group with branches in Orange County, San Diego, Phoenix and Washington, and which claims U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as its most famous member.

“There was something about women’s groups that I had a real need for,” Powell said. “It was kind of an ugly duckling thing for me. The first time I went to a meeting I felt like I had really found my swans.”

Powell, a marriage and family therapist in Newport Beach, was looking “for women who were intelligent, vibrant, exciting, knowledgeable. I have children and grandchildren, but I didn’t want to talk about them. I wanted to talk about what was happening in marketing, world events, the arts, the theater. I was looking for exciting people.”

The group’s criterion for membership, she said, is that the woman has “made an outstanding contribution to a field,” whether it be professional or, in some cases, volunteer or civic. Members, she said, make salaries “from six figures to nothing.”

While many of the organizations lead to increased business for their members, most women interviewed played down that aspect. “I think high-level women have needs and a sort of emptiness, and sometimes they don’t even know what it is,” Powell said. Because of the demands on their times, she said, “a lot of times we don’t have the friends we had in the old days.”

Annette Burton owns a Yorba Linda sales and management-consulting firm. About a year ago, she started the Right Connection, a women’s organization that she wanted to be a hybrid of a social and networking group. It now has about 20 members.

While she and other women managers conceded that they could share certain work problems with male executives, a women’s organization provides another dimension, they said.

“It’s interesting how people want to associate with a like kind,” Burton said. “I don’t know if that’s insecurity or not. For one thing, it’s mentally stimulating to be with people who have had equal responsibility. For women, with marriage, family and career to balance, it’s like being around a group where the sense of it is, ‘I know where you’re coming from. I know the hours you put in. I know the stress that can be associated with marriage, family and career in high-level positions.’ These are not things you share until you become familiar and I don’t think you really get to know people that well, except over a period of time.”