"Old Girls" and "Old Boys"

To get ahead at the office, more than a few career-conscious men have turned to their "old boy networks" of friends and schoolmates. Working women are now discovering that they can do something similar. In Minneapolis, some 2,400 career women belong to a self-help job-counseling group that is pointedly named All the Good Old Girls. For membership dues ranging between $5 and $100 annually, Minneapolis' Good Old Girls and hundreds of similar networks throughout the U.S. provide members with contacts among other working women, as well as seminars on topics like speechwriting, managerial techniques and job stress.

One obvious reason these networks have been organized is that, as relative newcomers to mostly male managerial echelons, women feel they lack the executive contacts possessed by their male colleagues. But members say they also view the networks as a form of consciousness raising. Says June Vereeke-Hutt, founder and head of the Women's Career Network Association in Cleveland: "We're taught at home to fight for the man, and unfortunately we've taken that philosophy into the marketplace."

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