SLOW GAINS At WORK

U.S. women are seeking a new role in society at least partly because in recent years millions of them have gone out and found one in the economy--as paid workers. Close to half (44%) of all women over 16 now are in the work force, v. just over a quarter (27%) who chose to have a job in 1940. When the Internal Revenue Service recently revised wage-withholding rates, it raised them partly on the presumption that the two-paycheck family --with both husband and wife employed--had become so common.

Yet there remains a shocking double standard in pay scales and promotion opportunities. A federal survey shows that the average woman employed in a full-time job earns only $3 for each $5 paid to a man with a similar job. Men at the top have a stake in maintaining the discrimination. If women workers got as much as men, wage costs would rise by some $109 billion--more than all pretax corporate profits last year. Increasingly, nonradical women have joined movement leaders in demanding a square deal in hiring, pay and advancement. They are making job equality their No. 1 goal.

Tokens and Bars. Women's protests are being heard in high places. Under threat of contract cancellation, corporations that do substantial business with the Federal Government have been ordered by Labor Secretary James Hodgson to draft personnel action plans by next month showing that they will take "affirmative action" to "remedy the underutilization" of their women employees. More and more, courts are ruling against laws or work rules that discriminate against women, including bans on laboring long hours and lifting heavy loads.

In some cases the official fuss has produced only token improvements. After the National Organization for Women picketed San Francisco's Crocker Bank last year, bank officials announced that the secretaries of its president and chairman had been appointed "assistant vice presidents." The promotions were counterfeit: both women in fact remained secretaries. With only slight exaggeration, Chicago Management Recruiting Executive Helen McLane complains: "America has put more men on the moon than it has women in the executive suite."

The pattern of discrimination does not stop at the executive suite. Indeed, the lack of women in skilled jobs and middle management almost guarantees that few will make it to the peak. At California's Pacific Gas & Electric, for example, 94% of women employees are clerks and secretaries. Manhattan's Avon Products Inc., which employs women for half of its 10,000 jobs in North America, has promoted only 14 of them to managerial ranks and none to vice presidents or higher. Boston's Raytheon Co. has been engaged in a two-year federal court action over charges by eight women inspectors of precision equipment--all with at least twelve years' seniority--that they had been passed over for advancement in favor of men with less time on the job and had been denied overtime opportunities. In blue-collar work, many unions agree to rules that screen out many women from certain job categories.

The companies that put up the most bars to female advancement are mostly in gilt-edged and gilded-age industries such as banking, finance, steel, mining and railroads. On the other hand, women have found fairly wide opportunities in advertising and high-fashion retailing. Countless companies require female--but not male--college graduates to take typing tests, then assign the women to clerical jobs. Says Barbara Brush, an equal-employment specialist in San Francisco: "Once a woman sets herself up that way, even though she moves on to more interesting work, her salary will be $100 a week below a man's." Reason: if she starts low. she stays low. The dead-end clerical route is considered so hazardous by many career advisers that they tell talented women students not even to learn secretarial skills.

Limited Goals. The chance to move up is discouraged in subtle ways. "A woman who wants to get ahead is branded as aggressive by company evaluators," says San Francisco Lawyer Barbara Phillips. "I wonder how their evaluations would look if they criticized men with the same words?"

Sexual exclusiveness reaches its height in business socializing, which tends to men-only affairs. "So much information in management is passed along informally at lunches, over drinks and at a bar after work," says a Chicago woman executive. Many male executives still feel profoundly threatened by the thought of working with women of equal or superior rank. Such insecurity often seems petty and selfish. Yet because the business world has for so long served as modern society's parallel to the ancient male hunting-providing experience, the insecurity is also understandable.

Men are not wholly to blame. To some extent, women end up with a low job because they start off with limited expectations for themselves. Mrs. Sharlene Pugh of Detroit recalls that when she became interested in math as a child, "people naturally expected I would want to become a teacher." Against the advice of friends and family, she decided that she wanted nothing of the kind. Instead she joined Ford Motor Co., impressed superiors with her computer skills, and is now a highly paid systems specialist. On the other hand, it is true that relatively few women have been willing to invest the grinding extra hours and display the single-minded determination necessary to make it to the top in much of U.S. business. "Women tend to see a job as a 9 to 5 thing," admits Mrs. Jane Gould, Barnard College's placement director. "We've got to toughen them up if they want to get ahead."

Despite that, the excuses usually offered by men personnel executives for discrimination against women are losing much of whatever validity they once had. The proportion of working mothers, for example, has risen four times faster in recent years than that of all working women, snowing that more and more employees who become pregnant return to their job after having the baby. Freer life-styles in much of the nation have made it easier for women to travel and eat out alone (though the discomfort for both parties when a woman buys drinks or lunch for a male client remains absurdly strong). Most women would still be reluctant to ask their husbands to move when a promotion comes along, but employers too often make the mistake of not even offering women the opportunity. Says Chicago Banking Executive Molly D'Esppsito: "Men so often make assumptions about us and close the door to advancement without even asking us if we would go through that door."

New Openings. Still, doors are being opened by the threat of legal action and the "affirmative action" order signed by Labor Secretary Hodgson. Many personnel executives are drafting timetables that all but guarantee a wave of female promotions in the next few years. Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, for example, has pledged by 1975 to assign women to 8.5% of the district-management jobs (v. 1.3% at present) and about 7% of the division-level posts (v. .34% now). Ford Motor executives now comb computerized lists of women employees for candidates to fill every new job opening.

With surprising swiftness opportunities for women are also opening in those longtime male preserves: management-trainee programs. For example, this June's women college graduates will get 30% of the trainee slots at the First National Bank of Chicago and 45% at Bank of America. Women law-school students, who compose about 10% of their classes at Harvard and 30% at Boston University, are being signed on by Establishment Wall Street and San Francisco law firms.

Too many young women still insist on preparing themselves for jobs with limited futures. Says Gail Morris, an assistant director in Michigan State University's placement bureau: "For the most part, women are majoring in the oversupplied, low-demand fields--especially liberal arts, education and social sciences." Women may well make their most visible short-term gains in these fields, simply because they dominate the staffs in them; thus more women will probably be named to manage school systems and social service departments. For the longer term, young women might do well to focus their ambitions on other, faster-growing career fields, even though resistance in some of them is still strong: business administration, chemistry, medicine, dentistry and physics.

Even with major reforms at the middle-management level, it will take time for women to serve out the apprenticeships that most large companies require of their top management. "The major struggle is still ahead of us," says Harriet White, personnel supervisor of Illinois Bell Telephone. "Those who take the first positions of management will have to put up with lots of gaff, with being called names." Still, the demands of activists are likely to propel women into jobs of real power sooner than many think.

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