Taking care of business with respect.

• Author: Woodring, Jeannie
• Position: Businesswomen in Alaska

Earning respect helped these Alaska businesswomen move past job discrimination and advance in their professions.

"R-e-s-p-e-c-t," Aretha Franklin demands in her 1960s' hit of the same title. "Find out what it means to me."

For many Alaska businesswomen, respect means success in the marketplace and an end to job discrimination -- if you've learned your lessons in the business world.

That doesn't mean that the women's war for workplace equality is over. Today's news headlines and book best seller lists reveal that American women still struggle for equal pay, fight sexual harassment, and cope with multiple jobs while running single-parent households.

But for some women, part of the war has been won -- or never existed in the first place -- because for years, they've quietly worked hard and become respected for their skills, not their gender.

For the women interviewed in this story, walking the "respect" path to business success has brought frustration, fear, risk, sometimes failure, and often, triumph. At the same time, it has brought them the confidence that they can improve their working conditions -- by first improving themselves.

After all, as Aretha sings, "R-e-s-p-e-c-t" is simply a matter of "taking care of tcb (taking care of business)."

ATTEND TO YOUR ATTITUDE

On a crisp October day in 1949, Gloria Ohmer, 23, sailed into Petersburg, Alaska, for a short visit with family friends. The next day, she heard about a job opening for a cook at a remote construction camp. Though she'd only cooked for her parents, Ohmer took the job and remained at the camp for six months.

"For me, Alaska was a land of opportunity," she says. "You get an idea, and people let you run with it. Opportunity was there if you wanted to put forth the effort."

Ohmer's short visit to Petersburg became a lifetime of seizing opportunities. Back in those early days, she says, in towns like Petersburg, the men went out fishing 12 months a year, and the women left behind had to do everything -- including running the businesses.

In such an atmosphere, rich in opportunity, Ohmer feels she never encountered job discrimination because she was a woman. Over the years, she worked as a clerk, window dresser, secretary, lab technician on a fur farm, post office clerk and bookkeeper.

Between getting married and raising five kids, she also managed the bookkeeping at her husband's cannery for 40 years, owned and operated a general merchandise store with her sister-in-law for more than 16 years, ran a bakery deli for cannery workers, and since her husband died in 1979, has owned and operated The Tides Inn, a local hotel.

"Everything that came up, I'd think, 'I've never done that, but I probably could,' so I did," Ohmer says. "People gave you that opportunity. When you feel that you can do it, often just that kind of confidence can help you do it."

The right kind of attitude has helped Suzi Waugaman, manager of Fairbanks' Carlson Center, earn respect in her career.

During an 18-year stint with Wien Airlines from the 1970s to 1980s...