Employment Women

Thousands of Swiss women went on a one-day strike to press their demands for equal opportunities in the workplace. Switzerland, where strikes of any kind are rare, seemed untroubled by the work action. The protest came on the heels of a poll indicating that 60% of Swiss women believe that equality is still only a promise.

One by one, their voices brimming with rage and sorrow, dozens of California women came forward before a special legislative hearing Thursday to tell of the sexual harassment they have endured at work, sometimes for decades. They were attorneys and hairdressers, high-tech saleswomen and waitresses, a neurosurgeon and a pipefitter.

The persistent pay gap between women and men extends to the highest levels of corporate America, according to a new study, with women executives on average earning only two-thirds as much as their male counterparts at the nation's largest companies. Still, women have made great strides in top corporations during the last 10 years, the study by the Korn/Ferry International executive search firm and UCLA's John E.

It was a big moment for a junior executive with ambition. Debra Douglas, an employee of Hyundai's American auto sales subsidiary, was having dinner in Seoul with the company's Korean chairman. Throughout dinner, the chairman asked her only two questions: Did she wash her husband's hands and feet? Did she believe in the equality of men and women?

Disneyland--where for 40 years the Jungle Cruise operators have resembled rugged outdoorsmen and the Snow White character has looked like, well, Snow White--has begun tearing down gender barriers for many jobs. In the past month, women have begun taking guests on the circuitous Jungle Cruise, past water-squirting elephants and stalking tigers, on a route where only male guides had ventured before.

More than three out of four working mothers who responded to a magazine survey said they alone get dinner on the table for the family when they come home from the job. Not only do 77% of the women prepare dinner by themselves, 59% set the table and 64% do the after-dinner cleanup without help, Working Mother magazine says in its February issue. The questions were published in the magazine in April and drew responses from 2,811 women around the country.

Outside of war, few people have gone through more complete, disorienting change than eastern Germans in the three-plus years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. From divorce laws to driving rules, from the currency to milk cartons, precious little remains as it once was. Motherhood is no exception. In the past three years, birthrates in the formerly Communist east have plummeted by a staggering 52%.

After nearly three decades of bushwhacking trails for women in the male-dominated workplace, Felice N. Schwartz has spent much of the past year fighting accusations she is a traitor. She hasn't capitulated. On the contrary, the dispute with some influential feminists seems to have sharpened. Schwartz is the founder of a prominent corporate consulting firm in Manhattan called Catalyst, which promotes sexual equality at work and which was spawned during the feminist movement of the early 1960s.

The number of American women in management jobs nearly doubled during the 1980s, reflecting their rising status in the U.S. work force, a new Census report says. The Census figures being released today also illustrate the striking deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, with employment flat in blue-collar occupations, such as equipment operators, while expanding swiftly in technical and other white-collar fields.

Growing up in central Illinois, Marilyn McCord Adams always wanted to be a preacher. Her grandfather was a preacher, her cousins, uncles and maiden aunt were preachers. "It was sort of a family business, and when I was a child, that was my ambition," she said. But they were Disciples of Christ, and by the time she emerged from an adolescent phase of atheism, Marilyn Adams was swept up by the liturgical drama of the Episcopal Church.