"You can come up with suggestions, but it gets no credence until a man suggests it," says Lillian Lincoln, the first black woman to receive an MBA from Harvard, who now owns a Landover building services firm. (By James A. Parcell/ The Washington Post)

Long Hours

"Progress is being made, but a lot of women are realizing it is not what they envisioned," and they needn't hew to an old model, Chao said.

Chao said she left United Way in 1996 because she was "stressed out and tired all the time." She said she was flying around the country and deluged by 200 telephone calls a day. One Christmas, she said, she was so busy she had her secretary buy the presents Chao gave her parents – something she knows male executives often do, but that bothered her a lot.

Chao's marriage four years earlier to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also had added to her public duties.

Chao, the only childless woman in the group, is now a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a job she enjoys but finds significantly less demanding. "Some people could say I'm a wimp, but for me this was the right thing to do."

Nancy Pindus, 47, of Bethesda, who received her business degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in 1973, started in management consulting, including an early stint at Booz Allen & Hamilton, which she said she "absolutely hated," because of the way young consultants were "worked to the bone." One co-worker, for example, bragged that she had not had to buy soap or shampoo because she stayed so often in hotels, Pindus recalled.

Pindus quit after six months and went into management consulting on her own, and later for a small firm. At different points, depending on her family's needs, she has worked part time. She is now a full-time senior research associate at the Urban Institute.

She said many of her female friends from Wharton made the same choices.

"We joke we're the poorest Wharton MBAs," she said. "More than one time, I've turned down promotions. Those are choices I've made that other people would make differently. But having an MBA let me make those choices."

The path away from the top sometimes revealed itself only after harsh turns, said Lillian Lincoln, who in 1969 became the first black woman to receive an MBA from Harvard. Lincoln now owns a Landover-based building services firm that had $60 million in revenue last year and employs 900.

But when she graduated from Harvard, she said, she was neither interviewed nor recruited by corporate personnel departments, so she returned to the management consulting firm where she had worked before she went to graduate school.

In her years inside a corporation, Lincoln said, she learned "women need to fight for air time" or risk being ignored in meetings dominated by men. "As a woman, you can come up with suggestions, but it gets no credence until a man suggests it – and then it's a great idea."

Lincoln said such incidents are revelatory. "You get to a certain level, and you know that you'll never get to the positions men do, so you start your own company."

Among the women who remained and rose high in corporations, careful career planning is a hallmark.

Christine Grant, 50, of Princeton, N.J., received her MBA from Wharton in 1973 and later received a law degree. She is the sole female vice president at Pasteur Merrieux Connaught, the world's largest vaccine development and manufacturing firm. Through the years, Grant has moderated her work schedule, doing stints at nonprofit organizations and a state government agency, before joining Pasteur in 1994.

"I've paced myself so I would go slowly on my career path to keep from burning out," Grant said.

She said she believes many women have fallen by the corporate wayside because, unlike men she knows, they had no game plan, and without measurable goals, they became stymied. "We didn't have that blueprint laid out for us," she said.

Shirley Liu Clayton, 60, is the only female CEO of a medical instrument company in the United States. After 13 years as a chemist, she was home with her children for 13 years. She received an MBA from Stanford, then worked at Bank of America and Genentech before joining a start-up firm called TopoMetrix Corp., in Silicon Valley, Calif., where she was promoted to chief executive.

Clayton said she is puzzled why there aren't more female CEOs. "I hope it's just a matter of time." As managers rise in an organization, she noted, "the comfort factor with your peers becomes more and more important. Men are more comfortable dealing with men."

The points at which the other women left, rather than merely diverged from the CEO track, generally came late in their careers, they said, despite early situations that were belittling.

One woman hired as a strategic planner at a bank said she was ordered by a company lawyer to copy documents for him, in triplicate. A management consultant said a male client saw her jotting notes and asked her to type meeting minutes so he would have a record. A woman hired as controller for an orchestra was disregarded when she suggested investment managers.

Although those demeaning episodes made them uneasy at work, most said what ultimately deterred them from moving into top jobs were deep conflicts about how to achieve balance in their lives.

Julia Winton, 48, senior director of human resources at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia, got her degree from Wharton in 1976. After she married and had a son, she envied friends who were full-time homemakers.

Winton said she passed up promotions that would have required longer hours. At one point, she said, she was acting associate administrator at the hospital. She recalled that the pressures started at 7 a.m., with nurses showing up with broken gurneys and demanding that they be repaired immediately.

The job was "very intense, ongoing and relentless," Winton recalled, adding she had no interest in the permanent position, which traditionally is a career path to chief operating officer and chief executive officer.

For Linda Taylor, 51, of Bethesda, who received her MBA from Harvard in 1973, the responsibilities of caring for her children compelled her to quit a job in which she had already been frustrated by pay inequity and the discrimination she felt against women. Taylor left her position helping manage $3 billion in pension funds for retired coal miners a decade ago.

At the time, Taylor said her husband, a real estate developer, wasn't as attentive as she would have liked when supervising their three children. She added that although he supported her career, he also wanted to relax and have his dinner waiting when he got home.

"It plain got to be too much," Taylor said. The breaking point came when a delay on a business flight caused her to miss her daughter's birthday.

The man who replaced her was paid 50 percent more in the job, said Taylor, who now works from home, trying to raise venture capital for a retail business in Asia.

Maureen Scott, former director of finance at Marriott International Inc., also is at home, having quit in 1991 after tiring of a 40-hour workweek that was considered part time.

"When I was 50 or 60, did I want to feel I had given my best to my family or to my work? It was really no contest," said Scott, whose husband is a partner in a District law firm. "I've loved being home. There are probably men who would love it, too, if they could have it."

But for others, leaving the workplace felt like admitting defeat.

"I've spent 10 years mourning the fact I wouldn't be a CEO," said Alice N. Rogoff, 46, a Harvard graduate and former senior vice president, business manager and chief financial officer of U.S. News & World Report. "I felt I'd been promised that in getting my MBA."

Rogoff said that her husband, David Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group merchant banking firm, was absorbed in his work and that if she, too, had continued working, their three children, all younger than 10, would have been neglected. Last summer, she purchased an investment stake in a start-up company and recently left her outside job to work from home.

"My motivation is not to make a huge rate of return but to be part of something interesting," Rogoff said. "Being a CEO is no fun. One long, thankless job, and then you can be fired anyway. Money, professional recognition, I'm finding you can get all that without the big company. ... Wherever this road takes me will be fine."