The Southern California Woman: ON THE JOB : New Worlds of Work : As the Fast Track Becomes the Beaten Path, Women Are Finding Innovative Ways to Achieve Personal and Financial Satisfaction

IN 1978, after 13 years of dues-paying in county government, Sylvia Fogelman was invited to become associate director of a major nonprofit agency’s planning and budget department. It was a move that she says “sounded wonderful” and fit right in with her career goals. When the agency’s director left after two years, the 43-year-old Fogelman was logically next in line to take over her boss’s job. Instead, she found herself watching the position being handed to a young man from outside the agency, and with limited experience in that area.

Her view of the situation is simple: “The tilting factor was that I was a woman and he was a man, and in that particular area, no woman had ever had that position before.”

Rather than stay with the agency, in 1980 Fogelman decided to strike out on her own. Today, she has her contractor’s license and is president of the Pasadena-based Shur Corp., a real estate development and construction company that grosses $8 million annually.

“I never expected to open my own business and be in the area of development and construction,” says Fogelman, 51, who has a humanities background and a master’s degree in social work from USC. “If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would’ve looked at you with a large question mark on my face.”

Fogelman is not alone in her new status. In fact, she is at the forefront of a movement sweeping California and the nation, as millions of women become entrepreneurs.

The U.S. Small Business Administration estimates that women own one-third of the nation’s businesses and account for the fastest-growing segment of the small-business population--starting businesses at twice the rate of men, according to Harriet Fredman, program manager for the SBA’s Office of Women’s Business Ownership.

Women now own at least 3.7 million of the more than 13 million sole proprietorships in this country, with annual revenues of $65 billion, an increase of nearly 100% over the 1.9 million businesses women owned in 1977, according to the Department of Labor Statistics. And once again, the local economy mirrors this national trend, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In California, women owned 396,294 businesses, according to 1982 Census Bureau statistics, the latest figures available. They generated sales of $12 billion, with the 185,017 women-owned firms in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties accounting for nearly half, at $5.8 billion.

“Entrepreneurships are the wave of the future for women,” says Mary Ann Von Glinow, associate professor of management and organization in USC’s School of Business. “They’re being their own bosses and being productive and getting the same kinds of strokes--benefits and rewards--that the large companies aren’t giving them.”

Women are becoming entrepreneurs for many reasons. Some are bailing out of corporations after feeling trapped by what they perceive as a “glass ceiling”--a subtle barrier that prevents women from moving up in large companies, because they are women. Some are frustrated by slow-moving corporate bureaucracies, while still others have been bitten by the same entrepreneurial bug that historically has been the American--although traditionally male--way of doing business. Los Angeles entrepreneur Tobey Cotsen, for example, had already guided her first venture, WendySue and Tobey’s muffins, from yearly sales of $60,000 to $1.3 million in four years, when inspiration touched her again. “I came up with an idea and it sounded like such a great deal that I couldn’t understand why nobody else had done it,” explains Cotsen, 30, about her second business, Bundle of Convenience, a home diaper and baby-product delivery service that has built a client base of 175 in its first year. “I kept tossing it around and couldn’t find a fly in the ointment. Finally, I figured I’d better do it before somebody else did.”

Last spring, the U.S. House Small Business Committee held hearings to study the growing role of women entrepreneurs in the economy. The committee’s report, “New Economic Realities: The Rise of Women Entrepreneurs,” called them a “gold mine of human capital” and contended that “women-owned businesses have become a central factor in the American economy and will become even more crucial in the years ahead.”

The growth of the entrepreneurial spirit is but one indication of the changing nature of the way women work in Southern California, as well as the nation, observers say. For one thing, as the ‘80s come to a close, increasing numbers of women are being drawn to business careers. More than one-third of the 70,000 MBAs graduating each year are now women, up from only 12% in 1977 and 2% in 1967.

But while many women are leaving corporations, it is also true that many more are working in the corporate environment than ever before; their numbers in the workplace are unprecedented. “Not everyone wants to be a CEO,” points out New York psychologist Baila Zeitz, co-author of the new book “The Best Companies for Women,” an extensively researched publication of what the authors conclude are the nation’s 52 most “woman-friendly” corporations. “Some women want a career that is satisfying and challenging and does not include increasing management responsibilities. Some are staying because of the benefits.”

Some promising women also stay because their employers work to keep them on the payroll. Others--especially on the West Coast--are ascending the management ranks from non-traditional areas, such as sales and engineering, where their successes can’t be disputed. Still others are moving to smaller, riskier companies in which they have a stake. “I see women taking advantage of the additional options that have been created over the last 10 years,” says Patty DeDominic, president of PDQ Personnel Services Inc., a multi-million-dollar employment and headhunting firm she founded on a shoestring nine years ago. “They also make hard decisions before they embark upon a (job) search, and I see them being choosy about the industry they want to work in, the kind of people they want to work with and the corporate philosophy they want to work in.”

Thus, women are excelling in areas that men heretofore have dominated. Richard Buskirk, Joseph DeBell Professor of Entrepreneurship at USC and former director of USC’s well-regarded Entrepreneurship Program, says one big trend in the ‘80s is that women are “taking over the sales forces” at the big corporations. He and other experts agree that women’s success in this area is no accident. Buskirk thinks women do well in sales because they work harder, are better listeners, and don’t get sidetracked by thinking they can “do their selling on the golf course,” so to speak.

With corporations feeling pressure to open more entry-level positions to women, sales has been a good place to start. There, dollar-based performance can’t be ignored, Zeitz notes, adding: “You can’t argue with the fact that Jenny comes in with more dollars above quota than Jim does.”

That’s the main reason Leana Grandy joined Xerox’s sales staff right out of USC’s Entrepreneurship Program in 1983. She went on to become the company’s No. 1 salesperson in her field in less than three years. “Sales is one of the few professions that women earn equal pay, and I’m very big on that,” the 28-year-old Grandy says bluntly. Money is also one factor motivating a small, but steadily increasing number of women to try blue-collar jobs, such as construction or factory work, rather than pink-collar jobs, according to some experts. “Many of these jobs do pay well,” observes USC Professor Edward E. Lawler III, Director of USC’s Center for Effective Organizations. “A factory floor job will pay better than a secretary or receptionist job.”

However, change comes slowly and, as Lawler points out, “the blue-collar world is more overt in its discrimination against women than the executive world.”

“It’s a man’s world, let’s face it,” says Jim Whisman, assistant district representative for the International Brotherhood of Operating Engineers, Local 12, which is trying to recruit more women for its apprenticeship program. “They’re making it in a man’s job and they’re expected to perform like a man--and the majority are doing it.”

The same holds true for women with expertise in technical fields, ranging from software to electronics. “If she’s good technically, you can’t deny it--it’s obvious in terms of productivity,” says USC’s Von Glinow. The number of women working as engineers and studying engineering in universities grew rapidly in the early 1980s, according to university and aerospace experts. However, it began tapering off in the mid-’80s, as tuition costs soared and federal programs designed to encourage women to enter the field were discontinued. It has since held steady at about 13% to 14% at the university level and 20% in the professional work force, says Tobi Roffman, director of the Women in Science and Engineering programs at Cal State Northridge.

Often, these jobs in “the trenches” are a good springboard for women hoping to work their way up the corporate ladder, observers say. “Traditionally, if you have expectations of being a senior manager in a high-tech company, you come through the engineering and high-tech ranks,” says Ken Patton, director of compliance and urban affairs at Rockwell International in Downey. “Enough (women) have not come into the pipeline early enough to be in the senior ranks yet, but our expectations are that . . . in the future we’ll have good representation.”

These days, there’s little question that women have penetrated the reaches of lower and middle management. Last year, women filled 37.9% of executive, administrative and managerial positions in business, up from 32.4% in 1983, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But they’re reaching upper management more slowly. According to one 1985 Korn-Ferry International survey, only 2% of 1,362 senior executives were women.

Similarly, a 1986 USC study showed that only 1.65%--or 152--corporate officers in the Fortune 500 were women, contrasted with 9,048 men, while women held only 217 slots in the board room against the 5,889 that men held.

Clearly, women executives still face many hurdles in getting to the top. For example, on the average, they still earn less than their male counterparts. Women at vice-presidential levels and above earned 42% less than their male peers, according to a 1987 report in Nation’s Business magazine. The situation has not been helped by the wave of restructurings, spinoffs and leveraged buyouts that has further narrowed the opportunities for promotion. “The era of the ‘80s has done nothing to further that cause (women in upper management),” says Von Glinow, co-author of a recent paper, “The Fortune 500: A Caste of Thousands.” “The data we’ve collected is unchanged from the early ‘70s as far as women reaching the top ranks of the corporations. It has definitely not changed and the numbers support that.”

Of the nation’s 100 top corporate women highlighted in a 1976 Business Week article, an update last year showed that not one was holding the top spot in a major public corporation. Most had staff jobs or appeared stuck in middle management. In fact, of the 46 tracked by the magazine in 1987, only 26 were still working. Sixteen had stayed with the same companies, three had changed employers but stayed in the corporate world, seven had started their own businesses or joined professional firms, one had left to start a family and 19 others had retired.

The women choosing to stay in the corporate rat race today and aiming for the top--despite the obstacles--tend to be better educated and more determined to advance. They devise more strategies to “have it all” than their counterparts a decade ago, says Zeitz, the psychologist and author. Jill E. Barad, executive vice president of marketing, worldwide product design and development at Mattel, and identified in Business Week’s 1987 list of 50 Top Corporate Women to Watch, is representative of the new breed of executive woman. “I’ve never thought of myself as a woman in work,” says Barad, 37, who is married and the mother of two young boys. “If someone is dissatisfied with me, they’re dissatisfied with me and my performance and not because I’m wearing a skirt or pair of pants.”

Barad is fortunate enough to work for a corporation that she considers good for women and that she feels puts no limits on her ability to climb the corporate ladder. Across the country, however, these corporations appear to be the exception and not the rule, according to the research compiled by Zeitz and co-author Lorraine Dusky.

Their list of best companies for women, for example, includes only four corporations headquartered in California: jeans-maker Levi Strauss; Syntex, a pharmaceutical firm; electronics giant Hewlett-Packard, and Restaurant Enterprises Group, which operates the Reuben’s, Cocos and El Torito chains, among others. Only the latter, which operates out of Irvine, is based in Southern California. An additional 20 companies mentioned in the book maintain major employment centers or offices here, while the authors target an additional five companies in this area--Arco, Carter Hawley Hale, Contempo Casuals, Mattel and Security Pacific Bank--as also “worth investigating.”

“There are very few companies that are gender-blind,” Zeitz says. She remains optimistic, however, that the numbers will eventually grow--not because companies will be forced by law to give women more opportunities, but because they’ll realize it’s in their own best interest to do so.

Demographically, this is inevitable, experts say, as the baby-boom generation is absorbed into careers and is followed by the “baby-bust” generation, which will result in a shrinking number of new people coming into the labor pool every year. Since half of the college graduates entering the work force will be women, they’ll be able to take their pick of organizations, Zeitz says, which means companies that don’t adapt gender-blind personnel policies will be “left in the dust.”

“I think at some point, they (the corporations) will wake up, smell the roses and see they can no longer attract capable people to work for them--and it’ll be too late,” Von Glinow warns. “A lot of old-line organizations who say ‘we can’t promote women’ will have lost on both ends.” Until that time, however, women will continue to try to find workable solutions to ensure they get what they want within the corporate arena. And inevitably, many will no longer be content to work for someone else when the rewards for striking out on their own can be so much higher.

That’s a lesson Sandy Steers discovered after years of working in the computer industry and being frustrated with big bureaucracy. In 1981, Steers took $500 of her own money and started Lorien Systems, a Long Beach-based office systems and management-consulting company. These days, Steers, 36, an Indianapolis native, supervises 28 employees and expects to log $3 million in sales for 1988. “You get frustrated with trying to fight a losing battle in the corporate structure,” says Steers, immediate past president of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners’ 100-member local chapter. “It’s very rewarding to run your own business and not only feel you’re in control, but see the people you hire develop and learn, as well as satisfying customers.”

That’s not to say that starting a business is easy. The House committee found women business owners still face tremendous difficulties, especially with finding capital, obtaining lines of credit and countering discrimination, such as lack of access to government contracts. Many new women business owners have not always had the same exposure to management and business training, or financial planning, that men have had, Steers points out.

“Had I had counsel, I probably would’ve taken more courses in accounting,” says Dolores C. Ratcliffe, a former public school administrator who started her own consulting business, Corita Communications, in 1983. “That’s a crucial area that you learn very quickly.”

Marie Teeple, the SBA’s women’s business ownership representative in Los Angeles, says she fields as many as 30 calls a week from women seeking information about starting or expanding a business. For this reason, her office has held six major women’s conferences over the past year designed to answer the queries. Interest has been high enough to draw crowds of 400 to 5,000 women per conference, Teeple says. The SBA this year has also been conducting an eight-city series of conferences on business expansion for women.

“Some are home-based businesses moving out to storefronts, some are one-person businesses wanting to add more employees, but they all need to find out how to get to that next step in growth,” says the SBA’s Harriet Fredman, who oversees these conferences. Despite coming to the arena relatively late, today’s women entrepreneurs are almost indistinguishable from male entrepreneurs, research shows. A recent University of Miami study, for example, talks about a “second generation” of women entrepreneurs that behaves more like their male counterparts. These women reported starting their own enterprises “to satisfy high needs for achievement, independence and control, rather than for financial rewards.”

“The driving factor behind entrepreneurship is independence,” says Robert Hisrich, holder of the Bovaird Chair of Entrepreneurship at the University of Tulsa, who surveyed 486 women business owners for his 1986 book, “The Woman Entrepreneur.” “The biggest reason anyone starts a company is that they can’t work for anyone else.”

Despite the roadblocks they face, women who start their own businesses have a surprisingly high success rate, he adds. In their research, Hisrich and co-author Candida Brush discovered that 77% of the women-owned firms surveyed were still in business after five years. While there’s no comparable data for male-owned businesses, the SBA data indicates that the success rate for women-owned businesses was about 20% to 30% higher. Hisrich feels that’s because women tend to start smaller industries, primarily in the service sector, than do entrepreneurial men. In fact, 83% of the businesses started by women in their survey were in the service sector.

“Women tend to be more realistic risk-takers than men,” Hisrich adds. “They don’t need to build a big monument to themselves to be satisfied they’ve succeeded.” But while most women-owned businesses still tend to be in the service industries, ranging from beauty shops to consulting firms, women are increasingly edging into such non-traditional areas as construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade and agricultural services, according to Fredman. Women’s ownership of construction, mining and manufacturing businesses, for example, increased by 116.3% from 1980 to 1985, according to the 1988 government report on the State of Small Business.

“There is a lot of opportunity for women in the construction business right now,” confirms West Covina contractor Colleen Cain, past president of Women Construction Owners and Executives, a 4-year-old national organization. “There’s still a lot of bias toward women, but it’s opening up for them and they realize now that they have a support system, so they’re getting into it.”

Ratcliffe, who is also founder and president of the 100-member Assn. of Black Women Entrepreneurs, a fast-growing sector of business owners, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, sees this trend continuing in the 1990s, with the “third generation” of women entrepreneurs being even more involved in the move toward manufacturing, with an emphasis on technology-related businesses.

Women’s share of the economic pie may also be increased by HR 5050, the Women’s Business Ownership bill, introduced in the House of Representatives last July by Small Business Committee Chairman John J. LaFalce, D-N.Y. The bill, signed by President Reagan in October, addresses such issues as women’s access to capital and federal contracts, and among other things, establishes new management-training programs for women entrepreneurs with matching government funds and improves women’s access to commercial credit.

“Women’s business ownership is clearly a bipartisan issue, and the stakes for the country are clear,” LaFalce told the House. “If we do not do a fundamentally better job of removing barriers and increasing support for women entrepreneurs, the loss to this nation will be incalculable.”

In the meantime, it seems clear as we move out of the ‘80s that women’s presence and influence in businesses, ranging from the smallest to largest, will continue to grow. And with that, so will women’s work choices, especially in progressive-thinking California.

“I think the nice part of living in Southern California is that we have so many different options and so many life styles are acceptable,” says DeDominic, who was recently named 1988 Entrepreneur of the Year by the 3,000-member National Association of Women Business Owners.

“Twenty years ago, many women were still shuddering about: ‘I’d better keep my mouth shut, or I’ll lose this job.’ They’re not doing that anymore, because they know if they lose their job at place A they can go to place B, or instead of helping to build a large corporation, they have an opportunity either to go work for a small corporation . . . or start their own business. It’s really exciting.”