Girls Get a Glimpse of Careers Countywide

At the Oxnard Police Department, 10-year-old Elizabeth LeMond tacks up mug shots and descriptions of wanted suspects. In a Newbury Park publishing company, girls huddle around a conference table to design covers for their own books. At a Simi Valley house, 9-year-old Elizabeth Suffern observes as her mother takes a patient’s blood pressure.

From Oxnard to Ojai and Santa Paula to Simi Valley, parents allowed their daughters to skip school Thursday for what they deemed a worthy cause. Ventura County moms and dads joined millions of other parents nationwide in participating in Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

Jane LeMond, a crime analyst at the Oxnard Police Department, holds a job in a field mostly occupied by men. But she doesn’t want this to discourage her 10-year-old daughter Elizabeth’s dream of joining the police force.

“I think it’s real important for girls to know they can do anything, especially in a field dominated by men,” Jane LeMond said.

The event, founded in 1993 by the New York-based Ms. Foundation, is aimed at boosting girls’ self-confidence and giving them a glimpse of careers when they spend the day with mom or dad.

“It’s a day to focus positive attention on girls and their needs,” said foundation spokeswoman Lauren Wechsler. “It’s designed as a day of action to keep girls healthy, confident and resilient as they enter adolescence.”

Whether in the office or out in the field, some daughters merely observed, while others were put right to work. And in a growing nationwide trend, county parents also brought along their sons.

For 6-year-old Holden Shobe, the day was a time to help out mom, who holds a job as an Oxnard police detective. The suspender-wearing child completed his assignment of hole-punching his mother’s files, before being allowed to visit the jailhouse downstairs.

“He has a thing about bad guys,” said mother Sarah Shobe. “He says, ‘Mommy puts the bad guys in jail.’ ”

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The event, says Shobe, should focus on sons as well as daughters.

“Anyone should be able to do anything they want to do regardless of whether they’re little boys or girls,” she said.

But representatives from the Ms. Foundation have concerns that allowing boys to participate dilutes the point of the event, which was created to focus attention on girls. Organization officials said they began the program because studies have shown that a girl’s self-confidence begins to drop as she enters adolescence.

“We are just doing something positive for girls, and we do understand the need to do something positive for the boys, but we’re not the organization to do that,” Wechsler said.

* Since the event began, the number of daughters participating has grown each year. A 1996 survey conducted by polling company Roper Starch Worldwide showed that 16.6 million parents took their daughters to work for the event. That number is more than double the 1995 figure of 7.7 million. No statistics are available for the number of boys that participated in previous years.

In Simi Valley, home health nurse Melody Stopher took the time Thursday to show her two daughters the career opportunities available to them.

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“I think my job is very important,” Stopher said. “It’s a nice career. It’s important for [my two daughters] to consider all the different things they can do when they’re bigger.”

When she was growing up, Stopher says, she didn’t know what she wanted to be, “but I certainly know I didn’t say I wanted to be a M-O-T-H-E-R,” spelling it out so her 4-year-old would not be able to understand her.

But Stopher’s 9-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Suffern, has already figured out her personality isn’t suited for the job.

“It’s a good job for someone to have, but for me, I don’t want to do it,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t like to do stuff with people’s bodies. I don’t like watching it and I definitely don’t like doing it.”

In Newbury Park, 14 girls ages 9 to 13 from Ventura and Los Angeles got a behind-the-scenes look at how Sage Publications, the world’s largest publisher of scholarly books and journals on the social sciences, operates.

After spending the earlier part of the day packing shipping crates with hardcover texts and operating a switchboard controlling the phone lines for the company’s 200 employees, the girls also toured the company’s ongoing plant expansion.

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Nine-year-old Kristy Wolff, a fourth-grader at Portola School in Ventura, said the visit to her mom’s workplace has prompted her to want to become a graphic artist.

“I think they have really neat computers, so I want to design the cover of a book,” she said. “I want to take a computer class to learn more about them because we have two at home.”

Kristy’s mom, Lori, a production manager at the company, which was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune, has taught her daughter that there are thousands of career paths she can take when she grows up.

“Sage tells women that there are no limits, and there are no limits in this organization whatsoever,” Lori Wolff, 41, said.

“There’s no glass ceiling,” she said. “You can do anything here as a woman.”

Correspondent Penny Arevalo contributed to this story.

* TIMES DAUGHTER

A staff writer’s teenage daughter reports on her day in the newsroom. B5

* NATIONWIDE VISITS

Millions of girls--and some boys--tour workplaces across the country. D1