THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406100619
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS
DATELINE: 940612 LENGTH: Long
Oh, why not dream a little? Maybe top secretary for one of Hampton's top officials. Maybe even for a department head.
Snead thought this was pretty ambitious thinking for a 19-year-old clerk in the Hampton city manager's office. She thought it particularly so for someone working a temporary job through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a 1970s federal program that provided training and public-service jobs for the unemployed.
{REST} The Hampton native had taken a year of secretarial classes after high school, and now spent most of her day typing and copying and filing the writings and research and decisions of others. Becoming secretaries or assistants for the top guys - this is what Snead and other women employees talked about.
Funny. The men working alongside them in City Hall, even the young ones on training internships, talked about someday being the top guys.
Snead had little reason to think like that. The only women in Hampton's top city-government jobs at the time - the mid-1970s - were the directors of social services and purchasing. That was pretty much the norm in city governments, long a bastion of the good-ol'-boy atmosphere: Men by and large occupied the leadership positions; women mostly filled the bottom squares of organizational charts.
The teenage Snead, working via a government grant, wasn't even a bottom square yet. But what she didn't know was that she was in a relatively good spot for a woman interested in working in municipal government.
She didn't know that today, a generation later, almost a third of Hampton's city department heads would be women. That this percentage would be half again as high as in Chesapeake; almost twice as high as in Suffolk, Newport News, Portsmouth or Virginia Beach; and almost three times as high as in Norfolk.
It's also 1 and one-half times the national rate of 18.7 percent, as counted in 1993 by the International City and County Management Association in Washington. Its survey showed that 6,877 women nationwide headed city staffs or departments. Overall, women make up more than 59 percent of local-government workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
``I think things are getting better,'' said Barbara L. Havekost, human resources officer for Greenbelt, Md., outside Washington. Her city is one of scores across the country with affirmative-action plans for women and minorities; two of its five department heads are women.
``I think the last 10-15 years have seen an increased awareness and sensitivity toward women and minorities,'' Havekost said. She cited a society that is more accepting of women in new roles, federal anti-discrimination laws and the push of professional groups such as the International Personnel Management Association and the International City and County Management Association.
The women who began joining men on municipal-government work forces in the 1970s also are developing seniority and naturally rising to the top positions, said Alan V. Christenson, personnel director for the Arlington County government. One of the benefits he sees: Women and minorities can ``provide perspective and insights'' that otherwise may have been missing in municipal management.
But Christenson and others who work in city government emphasize that the big news is no news - more women department heads hasn't meant radical change. ``I think only men expect things to be different with women in the workplace,'' Havekost said.
One who doesn't is Robert J. O'Neill, Hampton's city manager for the past 10 years. Told his city has noticeably more women department heads than its neighbors, he sounds surprised.
``We have some remarkably talented women in this city,'' he said. ``They, I think, would've risen to the top anywhere.''
His staff jokes that it's because O'Neill has four teenage daughters. But O'Neill said promoting women hasn't been a specific goal, although he and his immediate predecessors have tried to remove any ``artificial'' barriers to advancement and reward honest effort. That encourages workers, whether they're already employed with the city or looking for a place to apply.
``We've got a lot of people who've sweated long and hard to get where they are,'' he said. ``I think a lot of it has to do with the successes you have. You have successes, employees see that and say: `Hey, it's worth it to me to go back to school.'
``It's so accepted that we don't even question it.''
All Snead knew was that she wanted to learn as much as she could and increase her value as an employee. She asked questions, and took every assignment that came her way.
``I've often found that people love to tell you what they do,'' she said. ``You have to tap into that.''
Tap she did. In a year, she was promoted to a regular staff position. A year after that, she made administrative secretary in the budget office - her original goal.
But along the way, her goals had changed. Part of that was because she kept running into other women who prodded and encouraged her.
One was Rae Anthony, a secretary to an assistant city manager who helped Snead develop a rigid work ethic. ``I don't know,'' Snead said. ``She saw something in me. She pushed me.''
Another was Elizabeth A. Walker, who worked with the budget at the time and gave Snead her permanent job. ``She was just tops,'' Walker said. ``She was eager to learn, and she'd ask me questions.''
``She challenged me a lot,'' Snead said of Walker. ``She always seemed to give me jobs that would stretch me.''
Snead decided she wanted to stretch all the way to budget analyst, a position where she could help department heads poke around in the city budget to find hidden money for needed projects. ``Number-crunching,'' Snead called it. ``I love it. I love to help people solve their problems.''
She started taking accounting classes at night, working toward an associate's degree. Along the way, she married John Snead, a painting contractor. They had a daughter, Samantha. Snead kept taking classes. She got promoted to budget technician, where she got experience dealing with charts and graphs.
After she finished her two-year associate's degree, she achieved her second career goal - she was made a budget analyst.
``I did it! I made it!'' she thought at the time. But her excitement didn't last long.
``A week later, I remember sitting there and saying: `This is it? This is what I wanted to be?' ''
So, again, she adjusted her heights higher. And she enrolled in a local branch of St. Leo College to start working on her bachelor's degree.
Snead was discovering that hard work pays off in a workplace that doesn't determine how far you can go based on which bathroom you use. It took a little longer for Elizabeth Walker to find the same kind of place.
A Newport News native, Walker first began working in California after earning her associate's degree in advertising design. She found no ``glass ceiling'' limiting promotion because of gender in the more-progressive western state in the late 1960s, was given a lot of opportunities and wound up in an engineering position, rare for a woman.
She found out how rare when she moved back east, tried to transfer to the local phone company and found it almost impossible to get a similar job. To her, local attitudes toward the proper role of working women were 180 degrees different from those in California. A job with an engineering company working for the National Aeronautical and Space Administration taught her drafting skills. A desire for a secure job brought her to the City of Hampton in 1972 as a draftswoman.
Sexism made her leave the next year, she said, when an older male supervisor made it clear he didn't like her taking up a ``man's job.'' ``Instead of fight it, I went somewhere else where my work was appreciated,'' Walker said.
But three months later, the man who originally hired her for the city talked her into returning. Since then, she's moved on to be a planning technician, an urban planner, in charge of the capital or building budget, budget director for the entire budget and, for the past three years, an assistant city manager and director of the combined parks and recreation departments. When it was two separate departments, it was run by two men.
She can remember being the only woman at city manager's office meetings. One of only two women at a supervisors' retreat. The only woman going out to bars with the city manager's staff after council meetings. She felt uncomfortable, but she went because she felt it was the only way to know what was going on so she could be effective in her job.
Walker said she's seen that as more women work their way into higher positions, more men see that gender doesn't usually determine who can do what job. In her case, Walker credits that old-time supervisor who felt that women shouldn't work outside the home.
``Running up against him was very helpful to my career,'' she said. ``I just learned early on that you're going to run up against barriers, and you get around them . . . and you take responsibility for your own future.''
It doesn't take much to make Snead smile and laugh. She jokes about her jumbled office, about the papers and notebooks and computer printouts piled on her desk, side table and floor, about the yellow leaves on a neglected floor plant. When she looks up from her desk, she sees hanging on the opposite wall a framed print of pastel seashells above a hand-printed sign from her now-7-year-old daughter that reads: ``I love Mommy.''
She takes comfort in that. Her climb on the career ladder hasn't been all smooth.
After she started working on her bachelor's degree, she was promoted to senior budget analyst. She figured she'd be there awhile, but revenue problems led to severe cutbacks in the Hampton government in the early 1990s. After some restructuring, Snead three years ago found herself named the budget manager. She was one of the top guys.
Her husband's teaming with her at home enabled her to work hard at her new job - so hard, in fact, that her hair started falling out. Then, her resistance low from stress and fatigue, she caught a virus and almost died in the hospital. She hadn't wanted to ask for help, to look ``weak'' in front of her male co-workers.
``I know one thing,'' she said, ``that from now on, if I feel I can't handle something by myself, I'm going to ask for help.''
She's had to put that into practice more than she expected since March. Her husband, whose help enabled her to reach many of her goals, died from cancer, leaving her a 38-year-old widow and single parent.
And Snead works someplace where she feels comfortable ducking into a colleague's office, man or woman, and crying when she needs to, with no fear that she'll lose respect.
by CNB