JOHN BRINSLEY

Staff Reporter

Is the glass ceiling slightly cracked, completely shattered or not even there?

That’s the question being debated these days in all professions and opinions vary wildly. In fact, the pace at which women are making progress in corporate America, along with professions like law and accounting, is the subject of assorted studies and reports, many of them conflicting.

The roots of the debate are political. Many who contend that the glass ceiling has been broken are part of a movement seeking to roll back affirmative action laws and eliminate employment and education quotas. They highlight the growing number of women-owned businesses and successful women executives as evidence that sexual discrimination is essentially a thing of the past.

On the other side are groups maintaining that legislative and judicial action are the only ways to eliminate a pervasive inequity reflected in discriminatory wages and promotions.

For many, the issues aren’t clear-cut.

“My personal opinion is that I don’t believe there is a glass ceiling,” said David Dale-Johnson, associate professor of finance and business economics at USC. “That’s not to say there aren’t challenges for women in how they face work and family obligations.”

Indeed, many women interviewed as part of the Business Journal’s Who’s Who in Commercial Real Estate reflect that ambiguity. While they spoke often of obstacles in their industry, many indicated that there are no specific impediments in moving up the ranks. Some say the absence of women presidents or chief executives is due more to the relative shortness of time women have been in the profession than to any glass ceiling.

But this contradicts information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggesting that gender discrimination is alive and well. In 1997, women earned an average of 74 cents for every dollar made by men. (Preliminary statistics for 1998 put the figure at 76 cents.)

The situation in boardrooms isn’t much better. Last year only 11.2 percent of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies were women, according to Catalyst, a non-profit women’s advocacy group. And only 63 of the 2,320 highest paid executives within the 500 companies were women. That’s about 2.7 percent.

If it sounds bleak, consider that the percentage has more than doubled since 1995.

Still, there is a rising tide of opinion that such figures are skewed because they don’t take into account length of experience, as well as the choices made by women to take time out for maternity leave, early retirement, or other personal reasons.

“Women are in and out of the workforce as they take time out for things like having children. You need to take that into account when you analyze the statistics,” said Barbra Davis, managing partner of the L.A. law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. “Women are in the pipeline but they haven’t waited long enough.”

In their book “Women’s Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba argue that the glass ceiling, wage gap and the so-called pink ghetto are myths.

In key areas of employment and education, women have essentially achieved equality, they say.

For example, more than 50 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees are now earned by women, as well as 40 percent of doctorates. In 1970, women earned 4 percent of MBAs, and in 1996 that figure was 37 percent. During the same period, the percentage of women with law degrees jumped to 43 percent from 5 percent.

As for the earnings discrepancy, Roth and Stolba insist that when adjusted for factors such as occupation, experience, education and consecutive years working, the adjusted wage gap is much narrower. They figure qualified women make between 95 cents and 98 cents for every dollar made by men,

In other words, a childless, well-educated woman of the same age as a man in the same job will make essentially the same amount. But because 80 percent of women bear children at some point, and a quarter of women work part-time, the percentage of time spent away from work is greater than men, resulting in a lower average paycheck.

Hogwash, says Susan Bianchi-Sand, executive director of the National Committee on Pay Equity in Washington.

“The problem is that when women enter the workforce there is a clear gender bias that they take with them throughout their career,” argues Bianchi-Sand. “If a woman who has been working for 15 years is $12,000 behind a man doing the same work she carries the wage discrepancy around like an anchor.”

She says women start out making less than men for the same job, and the inequity continues as they move up the corporate ladder.

The differences in pay crop up in a variety of occupations. For example, a waitress makes 82 cents for every dollar earned by a waiter, according to the U.S. Labor Department, while a woman bus driver earns only 74 percent as much as her male colleagues. And in nursing, an occupation in which 91 percent of the workers are female, women make only 95 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts.

Those statistics also show that female college graduates make an average of $13,788 a year less than men with the same education, while women with doctorate degrees earn almost $20,000 less than males.

As further proof of the discrepancies, Bianchi-Sand cites claims filed by more than 900 women against Merrill Lynch & Co. that allege discrimination, mostly through lower salaries than men with similar qualifications. Merrill has said at least one-third of the claims could have some merit.

Other telling cases include an agreement by Texaco Inc. to pay $3.1 million to 186 women employees who had been paid less than their male counterparts. In addition, Eastman Kodak Co. has said it will pay a total of $13 million to 2,000 women and minority employees in response to similar internal complaints.

These and other cases bolster the argument that women continue to face discriminatory assumptions about their abilities, and resistance as they compete for higher-paying jobs.

“There is a clear connection between wage discrimination and the glass ceiling,” Bianchi-Sand said. “Drag this undervaluation all the way through your career and it makes it hard to get the jobs with the extra zeros and longer titles.”

Both sides in the debate use the impressive increase in the number of female-owned businesses over the past several years to support their arguments. Roth and Stolba said the number of women-owned businesses doubled between 1987 and 1997. They also point out that women now start businesses at twice the rate of men, as evidence that the status of working women “is far more complex than the women-as-victims theory can explain.”

A study by the National Foundation of Women Business Owners finds that 51 percent of women with private-sector experience reported that the desire for more flexibility was the major reason for starting their own business. Meanwhile, 29 percent specified glass-ceiling issues for their decision.

While entrepreneurial desire is at the heart of starting any new business, women are more likely than men to experience frustration in their job and use that as motivation to move on, the study concluded.

Clearly, no one argues that women face the same resistance professionally that they did 30 years ago. And both Davis and Bianchi-Sand praise legislation designed to penalize employers for any kind of discrimination.

“Sexual discrimination is not the same as it was 35 years ago, nobody is saying that,” Bianchi-Sand said. “But it still exists. I guess it takes longer to change attitudes than it does to change laws.”

Cheryl Mazirow, a 17-year veteran of the real estate business who is now a senior vice president at Grubb & Ellis Co. in the San Fernando Valley, said finding success was never easy for her.

“It was always a challenge,” Mazirow said “I have found over the years, you want to deliver the best possible service, and gender becomes a non-issue.”