U.S. Working Women Organizing Themselves : Careers: Frustrated by slow pace of advancement, they are forming groups for help with networking and work-family issues.

J.C. Penney Co. Inc. management looked around 3 1/2 years ago and realized that women in senior positions were few, even though the company caters mostly to women.

So, responding to a management request, Gale Duff-Bloom, associate director of merchandising, assembled a Women’s Advisory Committee that included employees from all areas of the company.

Now Penney has four additional women in senior positions and the retailer has implemented diversity training for store managers and executives.

The experience of women at Penney isn’t unusual. Frustrated with the slow pace of their careers, more working women are getting together to talk about networking or balancing job and family.

Companies as diverse as Bankers Trust Co., Raychem Corp., Dow Chemical Co. and Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. now offer women’s groups.

Felice Schwartz, author of “Breaking With Tradition: Women, Management and the New Facts of Life,” calls the groups a significant development for working women.

But others downplay their significance, saying some women resist joining them out of fear their careers might be jeopardized. Most groups avoid the work-family issues they consider controversial, focusing on career development instead.

The research and consulting firm Catalyst says a third of the women’s groups it studied were started by management. The executives, it said, recognized that women weren’t advancing quickly enough and that family issues like flexible work schedules and parental leave needed to be addressed.

Others were initiated by the women themselves for similar reasons. But about 70% of those now serve in an advisory capacity to management, according to Bickley Townsend, a spokeswoman for Catalyst.

The idea of corporate women’s groups first emerged in the mid-1970s with the feminist movement. But many then were seen by management as adversarial and discouraged. Others died out in the early 1980s with the improvement in women’s positions, Townsend said.

A resurgence began in the late 1980s as the country fell into recession, she said.

Meanwhile, companies facing lower profits have had to look beyond raises to keep employees happy, said Lynn Povich, editor-in-chief of Working Woman magazine. They are listening more, providing more support, she said.

On the other side of the coin, demographics are changing and companies now need to attract and retain skilled women employees, Schwartz said.

“For the first time, women are no longer superfluous,” she said.

By the end of the century, about two-thirds of new workers are expected to be women, and about 75% will become pregnant during their working years, Labor Department research says.

Still, high-level women executives often don’t want to participate in the corporate groups, said Dana Friedman, co-president of the Families and Work Institute, a New York-based research organization.

“They have the attitude, ‘If I did it, why can’t others,’ ” Friedman said. “Women at the top rarely advocate for women’s issues.”

Perhaps most damaging, Friedman said, is that most groups don’t tackle the more difficult benefits questions.

At Raychem in Menlo Park, Calif., the corporate group emerged two years ago in fairly typical fashion--a couple of professional women sitting around talking about how few they were. The group now has a mailing list of over 200.

“There was a sense that we needed to be working with management on hiring and promoting women,” said Carol Balfe, a chemist.

At Raychem, the women’s goals have been almost exclusively work-oriented. Most felt the company already was doing enough to help women--and men--balance work and family concerns, Balfe said.

At about the same time, a few women at Bankers Trust in New York, decided to meet regularly to talk about their careers, said Mona Lau, a vice president. The women’s group there is now about 600 strong.

Meetings are weekly or biweekly and committees address specific issues such as networking, educational events or career management. The group also hosts speakers and seminars on a variety of topics and provides opportunities for women to network.

The company’s senior executives have been supportive, Lau said.

“Management believes that to be successful the company has to be global, that work force demographics are changing and we have to be diverse,” she said. “Diversity breeds creativity.”

But the Bankers Trust group also mostly avoids work-family issues.

“We’ve defined our priorities,” Lau said. “We’re here to have a good career.”

At Dow Chemical, though, the women’s group specifically tackles work-family concerns.

The meetings were initiated by management four years ago to look at child care, flexible scheduling and sexual harassment.