Working Girls (and Boys) : Annual Daughters’ Day Has Become More High Tech, More Blue Collar and More Open to the Other Gender
Erika Ulfelder, who is 13, wishes Beckman Instruments Inc. hadn’t invited boys to the company’s kids’ career day.
Standing in the hot sun Thursday, waiting for a company photographer to snap a group picture of the more than 100 children and their parents participating in the day’s activities, Ulfelder griped about having her 8-year-old brother Leo along. “Sometimes me and my brother don’t get along,” she said.
Their mother, Kathy Ulfelder, a senior scientist at the Fullerton-based company, had bigger worries. She said she’d found it “difficult” being a woman in science. With her son beside her, she noted that she was glad he had come, but confided that she felt the day should be reserved for girls.
“I am trying to foster my daughter in the sciences. I believe my son is getting what he needs at school,” she said.
And so the debate over what the day is all about, and who should be in or out, intruded once again on the 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 certain number of boys, trooped into offices and factories across the country Thursday for the fourth annual event. 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, and the day has mutated in many ways, turning both more high tech and more blue collar at the same time.
Across Orange County, employers--varying from Rockwell International Inc. in Seal Beach to Reebok International Inc.’s regional headquarters in Irvine--threw open their doors.
Internet presentations brought the biggest cheers. Kids built home pages and fired off e-mail at several work sites.
At Rockwell’s Seal Beach headquarters, children, paired off around 15 computers, raced against each other to be the first to pull a page of Charles Dickens’ novel “Great Expectations” off the Web. Two junior high-age girls screamed when they won.
In the corporate board room at Fullerton-based Beckman Instruments, children sitting around the finely finished U-shaped table were enthralled as computer supervisor Tom Fosmire, 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.
“Can we get a picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon?” called out 9-year-old Brian Van Ryte, whose request was lost in the excited din.
Austin Herbert, 8-year-old son of Jeanie Herbert, Beckman’s manager of corporate communications, amused himself in his mom’s office by making an art project with her shredder.
But when asked later whether he’d like a job someday, he left no doubt. “Not my mom’s job,” he said. “I’d like the Internet one.”
Reebok International clearly offered some of the best goodies. The 16 girls who spent the day at its Irvine offices showed up in shorts, got a pair of tennis shoes and T-shirts to keep, and spent an hour-long workout with the company’s fitness representative.
But kids subjected to executive speeches and industrial videos grew restless.
At Beckman, President John P. Warham’s welcoming remarks apparently didn’t go over too well.
“It seems he had trouble talking to kids,” says Ryan Shirk, 14, who lives in Yorba Linda. “I can’t blame him. It’s so complicated, what they do here, that there’s no easy way to say it that kids can understand.” Beckman makes instruments and other items used in scientific research and medical diagnosis.
As many companies and government operations welcomed both genders to the days’ activities, the Ms. Foundation fretted that the original intent of the day was being lost.
“Why does this country get so scared when we put attention on girls?” asked Marie Wilson, president of the New York-based Ms. Foundation for Women, 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 “Children’s 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.”
Meanwhile, 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 Baylis, a Massachusetts man who heads a group and publishes the At-Home Dad quarterly newsletter. Instead, the day will focus through community events on such issues as conflict resolution, the need for a civic life and importance of “responsible fatherhood and responsible manhood,” he said.
Wilson said that the Ms. Foundation doesn’t dispute that boys need help, too. “I hope that something comes together and I hope they do something that really addresses the needs of boys,” she 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 a visit for 10 girls and four boys to Municipal Judge Soussan G. Bruguera’s courtroom in downtown Los Angeles.
The kids, aged 8 to 16, wore judge’s robes, banged the gavel, listened to an easy-to-understand 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,” Judge 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.”
Some companies intend to polish up their programs for girls. Though Reebok tried hard to give a strong sense of career possibilities, girls attending were not able to meet the highest-ranking woman executive in the regional office in Irvine. Regional Vice President Jo Harlow was called away to Boston to attend to corporate business.
Dawn Yager, a Reebok manager who organized the event, said she hopes Harlow can attend next year.
“She’s absolutely awesome,” Yager said. “She is a graduate of Duke University and was captain of their women’s football team.”
