First ladies

Kate McLean clearly recalls the day she showed up at what was then California Lutheran College to look into joining the school's Master of Business Administration program.

It was 1973 and the absence of women was conspicuous. An admission officer attempted to explain, saying there was some concern whether women could cut it in an MBA program.

As she has throughout a career that has included stretches as the leader of some of Ventura County's most important and dynamic social service organizations, the Westlake Village resident was about to prove her doubters wrong.

"I just laughed, because I had that statement given to me a million times," said McLean, who joined the program in 1974 and in those early years often found herself the lone woman in her classes. Three years later she would become one of the first women to earn an MBA from the Thousand Oaks campus, outscoring all of her classmates on the program-ending comprehensive exams.

"For me it was incredibly important to have earned my MBA - it gave me a sense of credibility in the work I was doing," McLean added. "I did feel that it was breaking some ground. I felt proud that I had done it and done it well."

Groundbreakers. Trailblazers. Official demolishers of glass ceilings. The first women to earn MBAs from CLU were, like McLean, all of those things and more.

Cal Lutheran conferred its first MBAs in 1974 - handing out eight that year to an all-male class. But the following year, two women earned master's degrees through the business program. And by 1978, 10 women held Cal Lutheran MBAs and were going on to carve successful careers in everything from finance to engineering to education.

"It allowed me to break into the corporate field and achieve my goal of becoming a corporate manager," said Westlake Village resident Margie Price, MBA '78. The Missouri native used her advanced degree to work her way from secretary to engineering manager at business equipment giant Burroughs Corporation.

"I never really thought I was a pioneer or anything like that," she added. "I just always thought that education was the key to moving up in the business world."

Significant Achievements
Those early successes were all the more notable for the time in which they took place.

The earliest of the female MBA candidates at Cal Lutheran began their graduate school journeys just as the Women's Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was gaining traction. It was a time when an increasing number of women were entering the workforce, but also a time when most women earned a fraction of the salary of their male counterparts and when many were excluded from traditionally male jobs.

It was a time when women had to choose between the career path and the path to parenthood. Even when women were able to break into the management ranks, too often they encountered discrimination and other hurdles that cut short their climb up the corporate ladder.

Add to that the fact that the nation's big-time MBA programs didn't even start admitting women until the 1960s. It wasn't until 1963 that the first eight women enrolled in the MBA program at the Harvard Business School, according to that university's website.

Enter this feisty, independent, and determined group of MBA candidates at Cal Lutheran. They came from different backgrounds, held different views of the world, and had different reasons for pursuing graduate degrees.

But they all had this in common - they were determined to gain the tools necessary to successfully navigate what at that time was definitively a man's world.

Women Stayed Home
"I think it was left over from the generation when women were mostly at home," explained CLU School of Business Dean Charles Maxey of the small number of women early on in the program.

"Nationally, at that time, it was still a man's game," Maxey added. "There just happened to be this highly motivated, determined group of people who didn't accept roadblocks. They weren't making a political statement; this is the thing that made sense for them to do and they set out to do it."

Maxey points out that much has changed in the MBA program since those early days. Starting with the inaugural 1974 graduating class of eight men, 2,284 students had earned MBAs from Cal Lutheran as of August 2009. For the past decade, nearly half of Cal Lutheran's MBA recipients have been women.

Maxey said that currently nearly half of Cal Lutheran's MBA candidates - 528 this school year - are women. That compares to a national average of about 30 percent female enrollment in graduate business programs at universities nationwide, according to a study by the nonprofit group Catalyst, which works with businesses to expand business opportunities for women.

All of the early MBA graduates went on to become successful women in their communities, and many became the first in their fields as engineers, educators and community leaders.

McLean, for example, was promoted to executive director of the nonprofit group Interface shortly after receiving her MBA, becoming one of the first nonprofit executive directors in Ventura County.

Santa Rosa Valley resident Lorraine Newlon, MBA '78, used her Cal Lutheran graduate degree to springboard to the top admissions and records job at California State University, Northridge. As director of that division, Newlon oversaw a staff of more than 100 employees and orchestrated the transformation of the admissions process from a manual system to the electronic age.

Camarillo resident Vivian Goo was a true pioneer. She was one of two women in Cal Lutheran's 1975 class of MBA graduates, the first to deliver advanced business degrees to women.

Cal Lutheran began offering the MBA at the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu in 1973. It was there, where Goo worked as a civilian planner, that she began taking graduate courses in an effort to pursue a management career.

"I wanted to set myself in a position where there might be better opportunities in the future and where I could be valuable to this government," she said. "I would get up at 3 o'clock in the morning to study for my classes. But I liked it because it was a natural fit for me."

Goo said the male members of her MBA class were generally accepting of their female counterparts, largely because they all worked together at the Navy base. But she said her educational and career pursuits weren't always met with the same enthusiasm.

Discrimination Starts Early
Dating back to her co-ed Catholic high school in Hawaii, Goo remembers as a junior being prohibited from taking pre-engineering electives because school officials didn't want her joining what at the time were all-male classes. That summer, she went across the street to another school to take mechanical drawing and engineering courses, and then remained at that school for her senior year.

Later, Goo would become one of the first female engineering students at the University of Hawaii and was elected president of the university's Engineering Club. She said upon her election, half the male students threatened to quit and form their own club.

Even at Point Mugu, Goo said she at times came face-to-face with the kind of discrimination that was all too common for progressive women of her era.

She was ultimately named the Navy base's first deputy public works director, but only after overcoming concerns that she wouldn't be able to supervise or give directions to military officers.

Her forte was organizational management, and she got the opportunity to put those skills to the test when she was chosen to help oversee the 2000 consolidation of Point Mugu's Naval Air Station and Port Hueneme's Naval Construction Battalion Center into a single command called Naval Base Ventura County.

Goo retired in 2002, but remains busy as a volunteer for a variety of clubs and charities, including serving as president of the Oxnard chapter of Altrusa International, a grassroots organization dedicated to community service.

She has three grown, professional daughters who, Goo says, have little idea what a trailblazer their mother was or how hard she fought to achieve success.

"Getting my MBA was definitely significant," she said. "It opened up doors for me and helped me progress throughout my career."

Management Material
Oxnard resident Nancy Stehle, MBA '76, tells a similar story.

With a degree in geology from all-female Wellesley College, she arrived at the Navy base at Port Hueneme in 1959, working as a civilian employee first in the Navy's polar division and then its division of environmental programs. During that time, she earned a master's degree in geology from UCLA. But she knew if she wanted to move up through the management ranks at the Navy base, she would need even more of an educational boost.

A friend told Stehle about the MBA program at Cal Lutheran and she began taking classes after work at Point Mugu, earning her graduate degree in 1976 along with two other women.

"I was a scientist competing against engineers, so I needed something extra to stand out in the crowd," Stehle said. "Just the fact that I had that ‘MBA' after my name said, ‘Yes, I'm management material.'"

Stehle would go on to parlay her work experience and advanced education into a job in Washington, D.C., with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, managing land and environmental programs.

Retired now from government work, Stehle devotes much of her time these days to community service. She is on the board of the St. John's Healthcare Foundation and serves on the board of directors of Habitat for Humanity of Ventura County. She also serves as chairwoman for the steering committee of the Ventura County Civic Alliance, a group dedicated to promoting a healthy and sustainable future for Ventura County and the region.

When considering all of the contributions of the early female MBA graduates from Cal Lutheran, Stehle said she is proud to be part of a sisterhood that has achieved so much and continues to give back to its community.

"You see the product, you see the people who have gone through the program and who are competent and contributing to all facets of the community," she said. "Yes, we've come a long way, baby."

A long way, to be sure. But McLean is quick to point out that the gains that have been made toward gender equality should never be taken for granted. "I sometimes talk to young women today who can't fathom a time when women couldn't get into medical school, or couldn't go to law school," she said. "But for them, it was not even two generations ago. We should never become complacent, because what has been given can be taken away."

--- Published in the Summer 2010 CLU Magazine