Working Girls (and Boys) : Annual Daughters Day Has Become More High Tech, More Blue Collar and More Open to the Other Gender

It was right after Municipal Judge Soussan G. Bruguera revealed that she had once received a death threat and was still sometimes frightened as she sat on the bench that she proposed pushing a special green button to demonstrate the downtown Los Angeles courtroom’s security system.

“Er, Judge, you might want to wait,” advised Pete Moe, the deputy sheriff assigned to the courtroom, “because there’s an incident going on right now.”

“That’s part of the job,” Bruguera told a wide-eyed group of students crammed into the jury box.

And so the realities of the workplace--in this case, a minor disturbance in one of the courthouse’s holding cells--intruded on the fourth annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day, created by the Ms. Foundation for Women to boost the self-esteem of girls.

Millions of girls, and a number of boys, trooped into offices and factories across the country Thursday. They listened to speakers, took tours and tried different jobs on for size.

The turnout this year was expected to be bigger than in 1995, when an estimated 5 million students participated in the sometimes controversial event. The day has mutated in many ways, turning more high tech and more blue collar at the same time.

The what-about-the-boys question surfaced as in previous years, and was addressed with a curriculum for those left behind in the classroom. Meanwhile, many companies and government operations welcomed both genders to the day’s activities. But as the Ms. Foundation fretted that the original intent of the day was being lost, a separate move to create a national day for boys has gained momentum.

“Why does this country get so scared when we put attention on girls?” asked Marie C. Wilson, president of the New York-based foundation, which launched the daughters day in 1993 in response to studies showing that girls suffer a sharp drop in self-esteem as they reach adolescence, when they worry more about their appearance than their abilities.

About 30% of companies that participated this year hosted a “Childrens Day” in the workplace, Wilson said, adding that “a lot of them are still focusing on girls, but they don’t want to be attacked.”

Separately, a “Sons Day” is being organized by a coalition of men’s groups, and it has been tentatively scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 20.

The day will not be career-oriented because “most boys seem to know that they have many occupational options,” said Peter Baylies, a Massachusetts man who heads a group and publishes a quarterly newsletter called “At-Home Dad.” Instead, the day will use community events to focus on such issues as conflict resolution, the need for a civic life and the importance of “responsible fatherhood and responsible manhood,” he said.

The Marina del Rey-based law firm of Berger, Kahn, Shafton, Moss, Figler, Simon & Gladstone encouraged more boys to participate this year after much debate, said lawyer Patricia J. Campbell, who helped set up the visit of 10 girls and four boys to Judge Bruguera’s courtroom. The kids, ages 8 to 16, wore judge’s robes, banged the gavel, listened to a simple explanation of the intricacies of the judicial system, typed on the court reporter’s computer terminal, visited an empty cell (“Where’s the toilet paper?” asked one girl, peering at the prominently placed toilet) and even e-mailed Judge Lance A. Ito. (“No O.J. questions,” Bruguera cautioned.)

“We really struggled with this,” Campbell said. “We think it’s a good thing for young men to be able to see women in positions such as judge. . . . We thought this was a tremendous opportunity for all the children, but women in the workplace remains the focus.”

Thursday’s activities ranged from the informal to the organized and from nontraditional trades to high-tech high jinks.

Internet presentations brought cheers. Kids built home pages and fired off e-mail at several work sites. Some attended a “virtual party” in the afternoon hosted by Global Network Navigator, a Berkeley-based service of America Online.

In the corporate boardroom at Beckman Instruments Inc. of Fullerton, children sitting around the finely finished U-shaped table were enthralled as Tom Fosmire, a computer support supervisor, using his own computer and projecting the image on a movie screen, led them on a romp through cyberspace. He sifted through sound and video clips from the Power Rangers, the Goosebumps’ series of kiddie horror books, the rock group Green Day and NASA’s home page.

Five girls from Hancock Park’s Marlborough School visited professional photographer E.J. Camp, who did the poster for the movie “Forrest Gump” at a Culver City company called SmashBox Studios. There they were made up by a professional and took pictures of each other. “It was so much fun going there and really inspired me to fulfill my career in photography and fashion,” said Andrea Bogdanovich, an eighth-grader at the girls school, which closed for most of the day, sending all 500 students to 80 workplaces around town.

Best Washington Uniform Co., a small Long Beach company that rents uniforms to businesses, put 21 girls to work visiting customers with grown-up mentors and folding shop towels. MCA Universal, which hosted more than 200 girls, employs enough female executives that there were plenty to place at each table to chat with girls at a welcoming breakfast.

Elsa Aguilar spent a morning drilling holes and painting at El Sereno Elementary School. Aguilar, 21 and the mother of two, is enrolled in the teen parents program at the Los Angeles school district’s Business Industry School. She said her short stint as a carpenter and painter had her thinking about an apprenticeship.

“I think this is better,” Aguilar said. “I don’t like office work.”