Four Who Made It

It usually takes prodigious effort, great motivation and many extra years for women to break into the command echelons of business. Often women have to start their own companies to get there at all. Here are four examples of women who have made it.

MICHAEL ALLEN BABCOCK, 45, a petite and chic redhead, looks more like a sportswear designer than the president and chief stockholder of the U.S.'s fourth largest computer time-sharing company. Her firm, Allen-Babcock of Los Angeles, has annual revenues of $5,000,000 and more than 300 clients. "I was always strongly motivated," she says.

Like many women executives, she got much of that motivation from a strong parent. Her father, a buccaneering oil wildcatter from Texas, taught her that, as she recalls, "being an entrepreneur is the only way to fly." He gave her a man's name and directed her to a career. Shortly out of college, she married a Rand Corp. mathematician. In the mid-1960s, the Babcocks saw that the computer software market was blossoming, and they started a service that allowed companies to share a highspeed computer by transmitting data over telephone lines. While Michael Babcock plotted the financing and marketing strategy, her husband directed the computer technology. But she increasingly took over operations and became president in 1969. She says: "I just love business manipulations."

Her pace is arduous. By 7:30 a.m. she is in the office phoning clients in the East, and she stays well into the night going over documents. She admits that "the price of my success has been enormous." One painful cost: because of her dwindling time for domestic life, her marriage collapsed two years ago. Her former husband remains as chairman of the company, but no longer does the grocery shopping, as he once had to. Her $45,000 salary is the least important reward. Says she: "I'm a gambler and get high on a business success."

MARION SANDLER, 41, comanages one of the nation's most profitable savings and loan companies, Golden West Financial Corp., headquartered in Oakland, Calif. A cool, self-possessed blonde, she patterned herself on her mother, who helped build a million-dollar real estate business in Maine. Says she: "I've always thought in an extrapreneurial way."

She went straight to Wall Street from Wellesley (where she was Phi Beta Kappa with a major in economics) and talked herself into becoming the first woman admitted to the executive-training program at the Brahmin brokerage of Dominick & Dominick. "Frankly," she recalls, "it was an advantage to be a woman. Customers remembered me." She wisely carved out a specialty--savings and loan associations--and after ten years was a recognized expert, handling $15 million underwritings. But it was time to leave. "The doors were closed for a partnership. To be a woman entrepreneur you have to own the store." With her lawyer husband, she found a money store to buy: Golden West Savings & Loan Association. The couple raised $4,000,000 from family and banks, took over the S and L, changed its name and started expanding.

While her husband supervised loans and scouted for mergers, Mrs. Sandler concentrated on attracting savings depositors. Particularly to woo women customers, she put originally commissioned works of art into every branch and offered tired shoppers a cup of coffee and a lounge. She also lured depositors by giving them free safety-deposit boxes and traveler's checks at no extra cost. Result: since 1963, Golden West's assets have expanded from $35 million to $500 million, and it has grown from two branches to 25.

Most of the branch managers are women. Mrs. Sandler believes that "women demand more of other women than men do." As senior vice president, Mrs. Sandler earns $58,000 a year. She does not mind that her husband is president: "I own the shop and don't worry about titles."

BETTY MCFADDEN, 50, merchandising vice president of Chicago-based Jewel Tea Co., is the first woman executive of that big supermarket chain. The climb has taken 20 years, and she says without bitterness, "I haven't moved as fast as I would have had I been a man."

Her career started almost by accident. Newly married and with a commerce degree from Ohio State, Mrs. McFadden took a temporary accounting job at Jewel and planned to quit as soon as she became a mother. When children did not arrive, she redirected her energy to the job. The drive to excel pushed her slowly up the male-dominated ranks to a vice presidency, paying an estimated $50,000 or more. She fears that her drive also earned her accusations of being ambitious, even ruthless, and she concedes: "I am a much nicer person now than I was when getting here." Interestingly, after she made it there, she gave birth to a daughter--at the age of 47. She and her husband, a Gulf Oil executive, were delighted.

Mrs. McFadden has been willing to put up with heavy traveling and many all-male meetings. She still runs afoul of slights because of her sex. Recently she went golfing with Jewel officers, and was told that women were not allowed to play that day. In finding more women executives for Jewel, she has been markedly unsuccessful. She admits that she might be a more severe judge than a man would be: "It could be the standards I've set for myself, or it might be a certain amount of jealousy."

PAULA GREEN, 45, the advertising executive who conceived the WE TRY HARDER campaign for Avis, found that women do not have to be No. 2 on Madison Avenue. She is president of Green Dolmatch, an agency that has billings of $4,000,000 from such clients as Seagrams, Hathaway Shirts and the New York Times. "Advertising," she believes, "is kinder to women because there is a need for creative people, whatever their sex, shape, race, parents, hobbies or hang-ups."

Miss Green began as a secretary, moved up fast by taking responsibilities from her boss's shoulders. She became a copywriter at Doyle Dane Bernbach, where, besides working on Avis, she helped memorialize Heinz' Great American Soups and Instant Quaker Oats. (The company originally wanted to call it "Quaker Instant Oats,'" but Miss Green, knowing how important the word "instant" is to kitchen-bound women, put it first.) Itching to go on her own, she two years ago set up Green Dolmatch with a pair of partners, one of them her engineer husband, now the agency's business manager. In addition to being an owner, she gets a salary of $60,000.

"I like combative advertising that hits competing products head-on," she says. But she bridles at ads that she finds insulting to women, particularly those that portray the empty-headed sex bomb, the "dumbbelle" driver or the mindless housewife cooing ecstatically over the latest detergent or deodorant. "Women take pride in keeping house, but it is silly to have them gushing over a clean floor. An effective dishwasher ad should show a woman competently operating a machine." she says. As for some supposedly sexy ads: "Girls smiling seductively from bathtubs appeal to ad directors, not women customers." These ads, she argues, are almost invariably written by men, who patronize for profit. To guard her own agency from falling into mantraps, she has hired eleven women out of a total of 18 employees.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.