Girls Get a Glimpse of the Working World : Opportunity: Daughters tag along to broaden their career horizons.

On the Warner Bros. movie lot in Burbank on Thursday, 323 girls were part of a magical notion: All girls should be given the opportunity to have big dreams.

Daughters of janitors were shown that they can be executives, daughters of executives sampled life as artists, and all the daughters were told that they could do anything sons can.

Across Los Angeles and across the country, an estimated 3 million girls ages 9 to 15 followed their parents, aunts, uncles, friends and sponsors to work during the second annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

The girls followed cops and corporate lawyers, trend-setting chefs and tradespeople, all as part of an event sponsored by the Ms. Foundation to reverse an alarming trend. When girls reach their teens, tests have shown, their self-esteem plummets and with it go their beliefs about what they can do with their lives.

At the Burbank movie lot, after the girls broke into groups to learn about animation, movie marketing, post-production and music scoring, some took the opportunity to learn more about their parents’ or sponsors’ jobs.

Giggling and hugging her father’s leg, 5-year-old Jacqueline Vaca helped prune the cream-colored rosebushes that blanket the Warner lot. “I’m helping Daddy cut off the dead ones,” she said, picking the trimmed flowers off the concrete and depositing them into a bag.

Juan Vaca explained that although his daughter was, like many other girls who came to work on Thursday, younger than the target age, it was particularly important for her to take advantage of this opportunity.

“I brought her here to let her know that there are opportunities for women to work in the entertainment field,” Vaca said, explaining that his daughter spent the morning learning about movie music. “If she wants to work for a studio, she knows she has a chance.”

Across the country, girls were at work: at BP America’s headquarters in Cleveland, girls mixed chemicals to make slime. At the Aurora Fire Department near Denver, girls wrestled with fire hoses. At the New York law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, girls attended a seminar called “Thinking Like a Lawyer.”

At the White House, daughters of Administration officials and girls from local schools roamed the halls and ate sandwiches on the South Lawn, served by White House butlers in black ties.

“We want to say to the young women of our society: You can grow up to do anything, to be anything, to achieve anything that your imagination and your effort and your talent will let you achieve,” President Clinton told them.

Last year, Take Our Daughters to Work was a small undertaking in some L.A. offices and nonexistent in others.

This year, the Hollywood Policy Center, a nonprofit group based in the entertainment community, coordinated the event on the West Coast and spread the word with a vengeance.

As movie studios, newspapers, law firms and science laboratories held special programs, the event moved beyond an intimate family affair and became an outreach program. Some companies, such as Warner Bros., sponsored a busload of schoolgirls, particularly from lower-income areas, as their daughters for the day.

“We sent mailers saying try to find girls who might not get the chance,” said Kathy Garmezy of the Hollywood Policy Center.

“Most of us who have daughters, they’ve been around this stuff their whole lives,” said actress Jill Eikenberry, who took a 16-year-old girl from Penny Lane, a Northridge residential treatment program for emotionally handicapped girls, to work with her on the last episode of “L.A. Law” on the 20th Century Fox lot.

“There are so many people who don’t want to do what their mothers do or who don’t have role models,” Eikenberry said. “It’s nice to be able to do this for them.”

At the Los Angeles Department of Street Lighting’s equipment yard in Hollywood, girls got a demonstration of how cranes lift electricians to the top of street-light poles. They took 25-foot-high rides in the cherry picker bucket, protectively escorted by their fathers and an aunt. (The one woman who works at the yard, an electrical craft helper, went up with her niece.)

“How do I look?” asked Michelle Long, 14, having donned a yellow helmet and orange safety vest.

“Official,” said her father, assistant electrician Tim Wallace.

At the restaurant Campanile, chef and owner Nancy Silverton explained the difference between Italian parsley and regular parsley to five would-be chefs, ages 6 to 11.

“Let’s go to the walk-in and pick out some vegetables,” she said as the girls trailed behind her, some so short that their white chef’s jackets looked like nightshirts.

Meanwhile Mark Peel, Silverton’s husband and the restaurant’s other chef and owner, demonstrated the fine art of using a carrot peeler. “Don’t peel your thumb,” he warned. “It doesn’t peel very well.”

This being Los Angeles, the cameras were rolling. Fox Television reporter Barbara Schroeder, on hand to chronicle the Campanile feast, did her stand-up with her 4-year-old daughter, Glenn, in tow.

Glenn, cradled in Schroeder’s arms and wearing a shade of hot pink lipstick that matched her dress, stuck the microphone in maitre d’ Claudio Blotta’s face and asked, “What does a maitre d’ do?”

“It’s so cute,” Schroeder said later. “The ‘awww’ factor is very big today.”

The day did not pass without controversy, though. There were complaints that it excluded boys. For that reason, Chrysler Corp. said it was not taking part in the day and was discouraging workers from bringing their daughters to the office. Other companies like Rockwell and First Interstate made it a Take Our Children to Work Day.

Silverton’s 9-year-old son wanted to be involved. “I think he feels today that girls get more special things,” Silverton said. “I told him that traditionally it was expected that men would ordinarily get a career. This whole day is for daughters to see what their mothers do.”

Or, like Vaca, to see what their parents want them to do.

Attorney Kim Wardlaw, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, said the secretary of one of her colleagues asked her to shepherd her daughter around.

“She said, ‘I don’t want her to be a secretary. I want her to be a lawyer,’ ” Wardlaw recounted.

Some parents were showing girls around hoping they would not like their jobs. When Detective Wayne Dufort of the Los Angeles Police Department brought his daughter, Nicole, to the Van Nuys Division, he hoped it would discourage the 14-year-old from following in his footsteps.

It didn’t work.

“I want to be a detective just like my dad,” she declared. “He goes around and looks for criminals. He goes from house to house looking for gang members. I think it’s fun and it’s exciting.”

Some girls were stepping into completely alien territory.

Girls from Washington Irving Middle School outside Eagle Rock rushed to sign up for the trip to Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills, one of the most powerful talent agencies in town, although few of them had any idea what an agent does.

Once ensconced in the art-filled interior, women agents and producers talked to them about how they made their way in Hollywood.

During lunch, super-agent and CAA chieftain Michael Ovitz, one of the agency’s founders, appeared at the conference room doorway to greet the girls and ask if they had any questions.

“Michael started in a mail room--just like the one downstairs,” CAA’s Anna Perez told the girls.

“What do you do now?” asked Stephanie Gima, 14.

At City Councilwoman Laura Chick’s office in Reseda, four Reseda High School students got to see the district representative and her staff at work.

“I thought she works inside an office and never goes outside,” said Gail Duque, 17, one of the students who accompanied Chick and her planning deputy on a tour of three businesses applying for building permits and liquor licenses.

In San Pedro, 14-year-old Erin Boyd strapped herself into the front passenger seat of a Jet Ranger 206 helicopter and gave commands.

“Air 170 clear,” she said to the radio voice.

“170 Roger,” the voice said to her.

As commanding officer of operations for the port police, her father, Lt. Ronald Boyd, routinely rides the airship to monitor the port for hazardous waste spills or cargo theft. Having his daughter at work “takes some of the mystery out of Dad, especially a dad who has a mysterious job,” he said.

Then, the copter landed.

“You did pretty good,” he told her. “Some policemen, it takes them a lot longer to show them how to do this.”

Times staff writers Scott Shibuya Brown, Ted Johnson, Chau Lam, Greg Miller, Lucille Renwick and Renee Tawa contributed to this story.