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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Some Professions Still Dominated by Men

Women may account for half the workforce, and they may hold half of the professional and managerial jobs in the nation’s Fortune 500 companies, but there are still plenty of jobs where they are hardly, if ever, found. For this report, the Business Journal identified four such women and asked them to talk about what led to their professional choices, how they manage in their male-dominated industries and what they, as women, may bring to their jobs that men may not. The four women occupy posts in the auto, defense, information technology and construction industries. Some landed in their respective jobs by an accident of fate, others chose it. But they all share a common thread: They’ve developed an expertise and a reputation that is not defined by their gender. Catherine Smith Service Manager Bob Smith BMW-MINI Calabasas Catherine Smith has worked at her dad’s dealership, Bob Smith BMW-MINI, since she was 14 years old, and when the time came to decide on a career, the choice was easy. “Throughout college I thought about different options, but for the most part, I knew this was what I wanted to do,” said Smith, who is now service manager. A graduate of UCLA with a political science major, Smith said she was attracted to the different people and personalities she came across working at the dealership and the teamwork required. Smith’s summer jobs had taken her into most of the departments at the dealership she started out filing and she had her first turn on the sales floor just before she started college. “I was the only female selling at the time,” Smith said. “I was more anxious about how people would perceive me because I was young, but I was pleasantly surprised. People tended to be open minded.” The same, Smith said, is true in the service department, where she currently manages two shop foremen and a team of eight service managers, six of them women hired since she took over the post in May, 2004. Smith made the move to the service manager position, she said, because she was attracted to the opportunity to have a more direct impact on the dealership. “People who work in that department kind of put their heads down and get the job done,” Smith said. “It’s also a job where, if something isn’t working right, you can change a process and you see the results immediately.” Although she thinks women and men can bring the same skills to the job, some of those skills may come more easily to women,” Smith said. “Some of the traits that are important tend to come naturally to women in terms of organization, follow-up, attention to detail, being able to listen well and empathize,” Smith said. Every now and then she comes across a customer who assumes she is not knowledgeable because she’s a woman, but Smith said those situations are few and far between. “I have found when you’re confident in what you’re doing and you treat people as best you can, that’s what builds credibility with them.” Elizabeth “Liz” Stretton Vice President, Internal Business Systems ValueClick Inc. Westlake Village When Elizabeth “Liz” Stretton graduated Loyola Marymount University with a degree in business and a specialty in marketing and finance, she had no particular designs on the technology industry. Until, that is, Stretton learned that the starting salary for what was then the Pacific Bell/SBC technology management training program was about $5,000 a year more than her friends were getting in other areas of the business world. With college tuition bills to pay, Stretton recalls, “I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ ” The serendipitous meeting with the telecom’s campus recruiters led to a 20-year career that has often made Stretton a distinct minority in the jobs she has held. “I always noticed. How can you not notice?” Stretton said. “You’re sitting in a room and everyone around you is male and you notice.” Stretton, whose initial training put her through a two-year stint as a programmer, was promoted to director of the engineering technology group before she turned 30, and rose to executive director before leaving to work for what is now Verizon Wireless and later for the online real estate service Homestore as vice president for technical operations. She left there to pursue an MBA degree at Pepperdine University, and while in school, her dad became ill. Stretton took over his construction business, another male-dominated industry, using a turnaround business plan for her dad’s ailing company as her thesis project. With her degree in hand, and her dad’s business seeing its best year in its history, Stretton moved on, in May joining ValueClick, where she is charged with managing and integrating a complex network of IT systems that has developed as a result of a number of acquisitions the Westlake Village internet advertising company has made in recent years. Along the way, she learned about competition, the art of negotiation and the game of golf. “One day I came into the office at SBC and somebody said, ‘none of the directors are going to be in. There’s an annual golf tournament,’ ” Stretton recalled. “I was out on the golf course the next day. It just kind of makes sense. You do things with people that you like to do. If they like playing golf, I better be able to hold my own and play golf.” As a woman, Stretton concedes her approach leans more toward mentoring and collaboration. But she noticed early on that her style was different from most of the men she worked with. “There are two skills I think were maybe atypical for women who went into the workplace before me,” Stretton said, “competition and negotiation. Those two things were things that I learned were key and things I was going to have to become very good at.” Stretton said she read a lot of books but she also learned a lot from the men she worked with. “Whereas I’m probably more of a mentoring, collaborative leader, they’re much more competitive. I’ve learned it,” Stretton said. “Some of the best things I’ve done is to come into an organization and assess where they’re weak, and hire somebody who’ll raise the bar for everyone.” Still, Stretton said the skills that tend to come most naturally to women are also the key drivers to her success and that of others. “Technology doesn’t get enabled unless it’s through people,” Stretton said. “Being open to mentoring, accessing leadership capabilities and the ability to multi-task, those have helped a lot of my women friends to hit the ground running.” Elizabeth Jones Program Manager RS27 Engine Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne Inc. Canoga Park One day about 18 years ago, Elizabeth Jones was sitting in a meeting with about 30 people at what is now Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne Inc., when a colleague leaned over and asked her if she realized that they were the only two women in the room. Jones hadn’t noticed at all. After all, Jones, who is now program manager for Rocketdyne’s RS27 engine, was one of only four women among the 30 students in her engineering class at Lafayette College in Easton, Penn., she was the only woman the year, as a college student, she joined the work crew in her Pennsylvania township’s summer program; and she was the only female quality engineer in her group when she joined Rocketdyne. Jones chose engineering because her dad was an engineer and in high school she was good in math and science. When she graduated, in 1982, the market for engineering was lackluster, but her resume made its way to Rocketdyne, which was looking for a quality engineer at the time. She rotated through all of the company’s test sites including NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and moved up the career ladder before moving over to rocket engines where she currently has responsibility for a team of about 45 people who build, manufacture and provide launch support for the RS27 engine that powers Delta II rockets. That’s nothing less than the power that gets such space exploration efforts as the Mars Rovers off the ground. There have been times when she has had to remind her superiors that she can indeed, do anything a man can do, like the time she returned from maternity leave with six-month-old twins at home. A launch vehicle was lost and the required investigation also involved reporting back to the Rocketdyne customers on the progress. Those customers were out of town. Several customer presentations were involved, and after the first trip, when a colleague went in her place, Jones noticed that her boss seemed to be working around her. “I could tell he was real uncomfortable (about asking me to go on the trip) but he wasn’t going to say anything,” Jones recalled. “I stopped him in the hall one day and I said this is my job and whatever you need me to do, I do. And don’t worry about my personal life.” After that, Jones made the rest of the required trips. “I’m the type of person that when I see the job I need to do, I do it, and I work out my personal life,” said Jones. “And that dedication has been recognized and rewarded.” For the most part, Jones said, she hasn’t been especially aware that she has largely traveled through a man’s world as she has moved through her career. Her small engineering class back at Lafayette had become a tightly knit group, albeit male dominated, by the time she was a junior, and she never felt like an outsider. “You were one of the guys,” she said. “By then we had been all together for so long it wasn’t really odd.” During her earliest years at Rocketdyne, she was happy to work with other engineers, no matter their gender, and joining the company’s softball and volleyball teams, she got the opportunity to meet other female peers who worked in other divisions. “There were a lot of people hiring in at the time and I wound up having two different roommates, both women who were engineers at the company,” Jones said. “We had a lot in common and it was kind of like my college experience.” Actually, her most prevalent memory of sex discrimination seems also to be among her fondest memories, the time, as a college student, she joined the summer work crew in her hometown in Pennsylvania. “The summer work crew ran these big industrial mowers, and they didn’t want me to do that,” Jones recalled. “They told me I could clean the ladies room and the men’s room, but if I didn’t like cleaning the men’s room I didn’t have to do it. I thought if we want to be equal, I’ll try it, so I did, but the men’s room was so awful, I almost threw up. So that’s when I decided we could be equal, but we didn’t have to do that.” Instead, she worked in stifling heat and humidity following the street sweepers to scoop up the piles of garbage, on the median strips pruning the plants and in the storerooms painting the shelves. “I was painting them battleship grey and one of the guys who worked there, he was probably in his 50s, he paid me the highest compliment he could.” Jones said. “He said, ‘you paint pretty good for a girl.’ ” But the bigger compliment came months later when Jones was back at school and the first snow fell on her hometown. The road crew had come by and, instead of leaving a pile of snow at the bottom of the driveway as they did with most of the other homes, they swept her parent’s driveway clean. “My father called me and he said I don’t have to deal with the snow from the plow at the bottom of the driveway,” Jones recalled. “I was one of theirs, and because I was, they made less work for my dad.” Valerie Draeger President Triliad Development Inc. Thousand Oaks The first time Valerie Draeger went out to a construction site, the crew started whooping and whistling. By that next Christmas, the crew gave her a silly-looking mask and a whistle to make her own cat calls. Draeger isn’t really certain how she got from sex object to becoming one of the guys she credits the crusty old project superintendent on the site at the time. But she does know how she has maintained that position. “I kind of barreled in,” Draeger said. “I just never think that being a woman should be a detriment. Part of what causes some women a problem is they’re always worried that they are a problem.” Draeger’s company, Triliad Development Inc., has just completed its second building for Rockwell Scientific Co., a 21,000-square-foot facility that will house the company’s engineering staff; two buildings in the $100 million Mission Oaks Business Park, a 55-acre industrial center the company is developing in Camarillo; and it has just sold another 200,000 square feet of industrial buildings it built in Channel Islands Business Park in Oxnard. Triliad has just broken ground on a 211,000-square-foot industrial facility for Haas Automation, the largest machine tool manufacturer in the country and Triliad’s business partner, and, most recently, the company won the competition to develop a site owned by the city of Camarillo, where Triliad along with Marriott Hotels, is proposing a 250-room hotel on Las Posas. Draeger still finds herself the sole woman, not just on the construction sites, but in just about all of the meetings she attends, but she never started out to break new ground in that respect. In 1976, Draeger was a twentysomething single mom who needed to make more money than she was being paid as a secretary at Los Angeles Air Force Station. She went to work for shopping center developer Ernest W. Hahn Inc. in the payroll department and moved into the development division as a secretary. “There was a gentleman there, Art Hanson, who had been with Ernie for 30 years, and he had no other life,” Draeger recalled. “I mean they had to call him and tell him to cash his paychecks. He didn’t have any family, and he was very knowledgeable. I showed an interest in learning how to read plans and basically he was ready to dump information onto the first person who would befriend him.” Early in the morning, before the workday started, Draeger would report to her newfound friend until she knew enough to move into a position as tenant coordinator for one of the Hahn centers. She moved from there to Cabot, Cabot & Forbes where she made contacts with companies such as what was Rockwell at the time. So by the time Cabot closed down in 1989, she was able to go off on her own as a development consultant and eventually began to develop her own projects. In the beginning, Draeger believes she got a lot of help from the superintendents on the construction projects. “A lot of the older superintendents would tell the crews they better behave, and word got around and I never found it that much of a detriment,” Draeger said. But she also set out to learn from anyone willing to teach and she was ultimately able to speak to her male counterparts with knowledge and authority. “You had to really know what you were talking about. You had to go seek out answers to questions and be able to speak with some sense of knowledge and authority on an issue,” she said. “If you didn’t, no matter who helped you carve the way, it wasn’t going to work.” Draeger said she was also careful to present herself as “one of the guys.” The culture at Cabot involved a lot of after-hours socializing, and, leaning on her family for child care, she made sure she attended, right alongside the men. “If I wasn’t invited personally, I just assumed I was invited,” Draeger said. “I never let that get in my way.” And she never blanched at off-color remarks. “If you’re out with the guys the one thing you don’t want them to do is to feel they have to be on guard all the time,” Draeger said. “So it got to the point where my mouth was as bad as theirs.” Building her career meant some personal sacrifices. “For quite a few years, there wasn’t a lot of dating going on,” Draeger said. “And you couldn’t really date the people in the industry because that would have been a bad situation.” These days, Draeger is remarried, with two more children. Well-established in her career and with her business, she rarely has to prove herself to crews or clients. And while she concedes that it is more difficult today for a woman to break into the construction field because development companies are smaller and there isn’t the time to train a new recruit, she also notes that working through obstacles is key to anyone’s success male or female. “Women call me up and say, how did you get into this? I tell them you have to keep plugging away and not get discouraged when a door closes, and not feel it’s because you’re a woman because most of the time it’s not,” Draeger said. “When I look back, if I’d taken a different path each time I was disappointed who knows where I would be. I always think things happen for a reason, and you have to keep plugging away.”

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