Some Last Words on the ‘Mommy Track’ : Workplace: Soon-to-retire author-consultant tells companies that women are a great asset on the job.

Considering that a typical woman makes 66 cents to a man’s dollar and that the inequity exists despite Felice N. Schwartz’s 31-year effort to erase it, the author is in pretty good spirits.

Schwartz, 68, is making her farewell trip to Southern California, lecturing this week at Fluor Corp., Unocal Corp., Avery Dennison Corp., Times Mirror Co. and other corporations. The “mommy track” author will retire in May from Catalyst, the New York consulting company she founded in 1962 to benefit working women.

“I really do see a tremendous difference just beginning,” Schwartz said. “I can feel people engaging now, and that wasn’t always the case. They used to turn off their hearing aids.”

Her message to companies is that their female employees are often a wasted resource.

According to a study by the National Council of Jewish Women, 78% of women in highly accommodating workplaces returned to the same employers after childbirth, compared with 50% of those with less accommodating bosses.

And U.S. women are a resource that few countries in the world can match, Schwartz said: In the United States, women hold more than half of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees and almost half of the law degrees.

“Women are beautifully prepared for the information age,” she said, pointing to one specialty of the Southern California economy. “The costs are very great for failing to manage maternity.”

Similar sentiments put Schwartz in the spotlight three years ago, when she published “Management Women and the New Facts of Life” in the January, 1989, issue of the Harvard Business Review. Schwartz’s point was to urge corporate leaders to give women more flexibility at a critical time in their lives. The article touched off the “mommy track” debate--a name given to Schwartz’s ideas by a New York Times writer. And Schwartz found herself the target of feminists who said business would use her rationale to put mothers in low-paying, second-rate jobs.

By the time the debate faded, 500 stories had been published about Schwartz, some lauding and others lambasting.

She defends her original thesis and offers practical advice to companies in her recent book, “Breaking With Tradition: Women and Work, the New Facts of Life.” Published in hard cover in May, the book is due out in paperback this week.

“Women have moved into the world of work, and they will never again go home on a full-time basis,” Schwartz writes. “What that means is that the workplace now contains the family--whatever responsibilities women had in the home are now the concerns of business.”

Schwartz suggests that employers accept parenthood as part of doing business: Disregard the historical roles of men and women; permit parents to cut back to half-time with reduced pay and benefits, and allow them to re-enter the competition for senior management jobs, partnerships or tenure if they choose.

She envisions corporate structure not as a pyramid, with one path to the top, but as a jungle gym, with sideways options.

As an organization, Catalyst has found itself addressing business only recently. Until about 1987, Schwartz said, the company served as a counseling resource for women and did some pioneering studies on family issues: child care, relocation, parental leave, flexible benefits.

But the company, which now has 41 staff members, has recently begun putting its arguments in profit-and-loss terms. For example, Schwartz said, the cost of replacing a top manager is about 150% of that person’s annual salary.

She asks businesses to compare that with the cost of allowing a woman three months off for maternity leave: “You can’t afford three months? Hogwash! You can’t afford not to.”