<i> Realpolitik</i> for the Working Woman : ROGERS’ RULES FOR BUSINESSWOMEN : How to Start a Career and Move Up the Ladder <i> by Henry C. Rogers (St. Martin’s Press: $16.95; 240 pp.) </i>

There have been scores of feminist business books about the strategies women need at work. The idea that a woman must move through her career like a crafty and ever-vigilant foreigner in the enemy camp was bound to have its impact on young women.

Henry Rogers, founder and chairman of the executive committee of L.A.’s Rogers & Cowan, one of the nation’s largest public relations firms, says that he was moved to write his book by students in a UCLA Extension course he taught on “The Politics of Success.” His male students were concerned with the nuts and bolts of getting ahead. The women, he wrote, were worried about how to make it in what they perceived as a man’s world.

While Rogers is a bit sanguine about the obstacles sex discrimination places before working women, he feels, and rightly so, that no ambitious young woman with hopes and plans should launch her career in gloom, assuming that she will become one of the depressing statistics about lower pay or that she will work for 20 years only to bump her head on the glass ceiling.

That said, Rogers gets on with a variety of concrete, step-by-step advisories, refreshingly free of ideology, on how to achieve professional success.

One place it makes for itself in the market is that Rogers’ book is aimed primarily at young adults. The straight talk about the long hours, hard work and dedication it takes to get ahead in business will come as no surprise to older professional people, but it is a good reminder for students, and one of Rogers’ chapters is on how to decide if you really want a career (as opposed to a job), a decision that people do make without realizing the trade-offs involved.

Rogers has observed that young people seem to have trouble with the transition from college to work, where the object is money, not their enrichment and education; where there are no points for showing up and “grades” are not revealed. He outlines ways that young workers can find out how they are doing. While these sections are of interest to young men, women particularly need the help as they have fewer role models, slower entry to company networks and less easily attract mentors. (Rogers covers how to achieve these things too.)

Not understanding the importance of image and visibility at work has been a major problem for women, all too many of whom have sat at their desks applying the most talent for the longest hours and wondering why nobody noticed them when a promotion came around. A woman worker’s savvy about how she looks to superiors and co-workers will get her further than talent, Rogers says. As an employer for almost all of his career, he knows what impresses him and suggests that workers take a hard, honest look at themselves and create a more impressive image when the powers that be seem indifferent or negative.

While urging women not to demoralize themselves with fear of discrimination, Rogers does not imply the workplace is unisex or feminized. A discrimination lawsuit will get you branded as a troublemaker in your industry, he writes. And forget the magazines that say it’s now OK to look sexy or feminine on the job. Businessmen don’t entrust important deals to people wearing “cute little” flower printed dresses with lace collars.

Rogers has chapters on how to find a first job, how to establish career-long networks, dealing with bosses, entrepreneurship and other subjects, all with lists of steps that can be taken to achieve one’s aim.

(On power and risk-taking, areas that have been daunting to many women, Rogers’ breakdown into bite-size pieces is particularly helpful.)

The book has a too-strong (but not exclusive) focus on women who have triumphed in a few fields--such as entertainment and public relations--that may be a bit more fluid for women than, say, finance or insurance.

Also, Rogers and a number of successful women he interviewed highly recommended starting on the road to high places as a secretary. This has been a notorious Slough of Despond for women workers, and one where the employer’s agenda is often hidden. Rogers might have given information on how a secretary can discern between jobs with opportunity and dead ends. This is the third book of advice in which Rogers has shared his business experience, so perhaps that question will be answered in his next.