Women's work, long an outlet for the lower classes, suddenly became a middle-class pursuit. By 1991, nearly two thirds of all married women with children were in the labor force. And just as single women had provoked prewar wage labor laws, working mothers drove the postwar social policy debate around variations on a single theme: child care. With the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act, job-preserving legislation aimed at women once again benefited both sexes. By 1999, 40 percent of the 20 million workers who had taken that unpaid leave were men.

The perennial conflict between a woman's career and her kids may have left the most profound mark on the nation's psyche. "I don't know a single female executive with a family who's comfortable making the kind of compromises she has to make in her personal life," says Dana Walden, president of Twentieth Century Fox Television and mother of a 2-year-old daughter. "You have to sacrifice what your male counterparts don't."

Today, corporate America may serve as the best measure of the strides women have made in the workforce. For years, they crashed executive suites with headlines and hoopla. But now, progress seems stalled. Last year, Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit that tracks female clout in the Fortune 500, reported that the proportion of top female officers since 1995 has nearly doubled from 8.7 percent to 15.7 percent. But that translates to a mere 2,140 female executives out of 13,600.

Stumbling blocks. Even in the loftiest corporate suites, a stubborn gender wage gap persists. In 1900, women earned 50 cents for every dollar a man made. A century later, they earn only 76 cents. Critics blame women for detouring to have children or opting for occupational versions of the mommy track. As women have decamped from corporations in record numbers to start their own businesses over the past decade, capital remains their biggest obstacle: Only 39 percent have landed loans from commercial banks, compared with 52 percent of male business owners. When Linda Alvarado set up her contracting firm, she was rejected by six banks. Her father, by then an Energy Department inspector, remortgaged the family's house to lend her $2,500 in start-up funds. "You can imagine how I felt," she says, "knowing that if I screwed up, they'd lose everything."

Alvarado not only recouped that investment; she has triumphed in a field where women make up scarcely 2.4 percent of skilled workers. For nearly 20 years, Lauren Sugerman, a college dropout, has been training women to invade those blue-collar trades. When she apprenticed as an elevator technician in the 1980s, every hurdle was thrown her way: Male colleagues abandoned her in a public-housing project and groped her breast on a crowded skip-hoist. Now, as president of Chicago Women in Trades, Sugerman is nudging a new crop of women into carpentry or electrical careers. "As long as there's occupational segregation by gender," she says, "women's wages will never be equal to men's."

In the annals of women's work, progress often lies in the eye of the beholder. Alvarado, who watched her mother haul water from a New Mexico drainage ditch to wash her six kids' clothes, now sits in the owner's box at Colorado Rockies games--the first Hispanic to share a stake in a Major League Baseball team. Taking girls' clubs on tours of the stadium or her construction sites, she points out career possibilities. But she likes to conclude by patting her leather-tooled president's chair. "That job you want to aim for," she says, "is mine."

Previous Page