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∙STOCK TRADING: Mary Whelton, who says she is fortyish, handles from $2,000,000 to $10 million worth of stocks every day as one of three traders at Boston's Massachusetts Investors Trust, one of the nation's largest mutual funds. "You can't lose your cool when you're handling the kind of stocks MIT does," says an admiring male associate, "and Mary Whelton is calm, cool, collected—and very, very smart."
∙MARKETING: Lia de Keyzer, 30, was recently named press officer at Unilever's Rotterdam headquarters, succeeding a male who was retiring. Unilever, a pioneer in putting women into the executive suite, also has a feminine managing director of its British research bureau. Other European companies are slowly doing the same thing. Imperial Chemical Industries recently began interviewing and recruiting women students as it has long done with men.
∙TECHNOLOGY: Catherine Selleck, 34, of Los Angeles, is manager of IBM's Western Region Systems and Installation Center, heads a staff of 17 men and two women who provide technical assistance for IBM computer-service men. Because of severe shortages of programmers and systems analysts, women have at last moved strongly into the computer field. Barbara Johnson, 41, when nine-year-old son Eric asks her about space, can give a better answer than most mothers: as supervisor of the entry and trajectory group of North American Rockwell's Apollo project, Mrs. Johnson is an aerodynamics engineer in charge of 18 other engineers, all men.
Along with the Pill. The reasons behind such wide-ranging feminine activities stretch from the legal to the physiological. In the U.S., for instance, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate between the sexes in matters of employment. Other nations have passed similar laws or eased tax regulations that formerly penalized the working woman. Moreover, the laws of nature have also been amended with the increasing use of contraceptives. Says Joan Keenan, superintendent of agencies in the field-office department of John Hancock, and supervisor of 1,800 people in 300 offices: "The pill has worked wonders with the termination rate. The girls do not leave seven months after they get married, as they used to." Thus employers who formerly considered women poor long-term risks are now willing to hire them. Once on the job, however, women still find outright or subtle discrimination. The biggest discrepancy is pay; almost nowhere are women paid at the same rate as men, even when they perform the same tasks. Women executives, moreover, are barred from many luncheon clubs and kept off executive airplane flights. Their irritation at such slights is not all pride, since many a business conference is carried on across the lunch table or aboard an airplane. Muriel Siebert, 38, holds a $445,000 seat on the New York Stock Exchange, the first woman to buy one, but does not take advantage of her privilege to trade on the floor of the exchange. One reason is that the floor, with its 1,366 men, has no rest-room facilities for women.