Anyone searching for signs of women’s professional progress need look no further than the field of public relations, where in San Diego female-owned companies have emerged as shining role models.

Stoorza Communications, a full-service public relations firm, has five offices in California and about 100 employees. A year ago annual revenue topped $9 million. But Gail Stoorza-Gill remembers leaner times, when she had to build her business from scratch. After working for the Phillips-Ramsey public relations firm and Avco Community Developers, she started her own company in 1974 with only two accounts — Avco and the Vic Braden Tennis College. She had no money and had to have someone explain the meaning of a line of credit. “I just bootstrapped it the whole way,” recalls Stoorza-Gill.

In Sorrento Valley, Jacqueline Townsend Konstanturos tells a similar rags-to-riches story. She was a single mother (she since has remarried) with two teen-age sons and not much money to invest when she founded her company eight years ago. The Townsend Agency quickly grew, handling advertising, public relations and strategic marketing for rapid growth and emerging companies. Today, she has 70 employees and capitalized billings that reached $45 million last year.

Stoorza-Gill and Townsend Konstanturos attribute their success to hard work and sacrifice. Neither felt hobbled by sex discrimination. But both say that in other companies, that nemesis — the glass ceiling — still hangs stubbornly over the heads of upwardly mobile career women. Townsend Konstanturos says women have to work harder than men to prove their abilities. And Stoorza-Gill sees too few women advancing to the highest positions. “There are still a whole lot more men at the top, particularly in the larger corporations,” she says.

Statistics show women are moving through the corporate ranks, but their advancement slows as they move up the ladder — and become more visible. A survey by Catalyst reveals that the proportion of managerial and professional positions in U.S. firms rose from 46 percent in 1996 to 49 percent in 1999. During the same period, female corporate officers increased from 10 percent to 12 percent, while the percent of board directors rose from 9.5 percent to 11 percent. The number of female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies doubled — from one to two.

The wage gap between men and women still exists, although a 1999 salary survey by Working Woman magazine shows it is shrinking in some professions. One of the bright spots is advertising, where women now earn 90 percent of the salary of men in the same position.The publication reports that women in medium-sized ad companies actually take home annually $10,000 more than their male counterparts. In other fields, the gap persists. For instance, women in the legal profession made 70 cents for every dollar earned by a man, the survey indicates, and online jobs paid men 15 percent more than women.

Women also are struggling to close the wage gap in the sciences, sometimes with a push from the government. In July, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that the San Diego office of GenProbe Inc. settled an anti-discrimination claim by agreeing to pay $11,632 in back wages, including interest, to each of 11 female employees, and by raising their salaries an average $4,000 each. GenProbe, headquartered in Japan, came under scrutiny because it held a federal contract to develop, make and sell genetic tools for diagnosing human disease. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs uncovered GenProbe discrimination during a routine review of its personnel records.

Faced with these lingering obstacles, many women have chosen to start their own businesses rather than bump heads with corporate higher-ups. Women are creating new businesses at twice the rate of all businesses, the U.S. Small Business Administration reports. The SBA estimates that nationwide, women own 9.1 million companies, employ 27.5 million people and contribute $3.6 trillion in sales and revenue.

Between 22 percent and 24 percent of the loans made out of the San Diego SBA office go to woman-owned businesses, says Delores Braswell, women’s business representative in the San Diego SBA office. To help with their needs, the SBA offers support to women business owners, including workshops and advice on how to win contracts and subcontracts.

“What is happening is that women are making more of a foothold,” Braswell says. “Women are running all kinds of businesses. We have women running construction companies and selling pipe fittings to the military and doing many different things in the high-tech community also. We’re going to see more and more of that because these women have daughters, and their daughters are not being brought up thinking, ‘Well, I can’t do it.’ Many of the young women who are around today have always thought, ‘I can do whatever I want,’ and it wasn’t just something to say, it was actually, ‘Well, Mom’s doing this.’”

In fact, it’s not unusual to find high-achieving San Diego women whose mothers also were successful. For instance, attorney Andrea Migdal is the daughter of Dorothy Migdal, the no-nonsense, highly respected vice president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, who served as director of its local government division until her death in 1989. Andrea has carved her own career path, starting in Washington, D.C., after her graduation from the George Washington University law school. She worked with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a representative in the Office of U.S. Trade before returning to San Diego in 1992. Here she became a partner at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, specializing in intellectual property. She later served as counsel for Dot Wireless Inc.

However busy her career, Migdal — like many other professional women — actively participates in a networking organization. In her case, she is a leader of the Women in International Trade group, which in October staged a major international business conference in San Diego. She says the organization provides “support for women who want to excel,” offering them a chance to find information and mentors in the field of international trade.

Similar trade and professional groups have begun to gain numbers and clout. For example, UCSD Connect/Athena, an organization of local female senior executives in high-tech and life science companies, has grown to more than 175 members in the past two years. Now it is recruiting female middle managers for its new associate membership level. Teresa Young, chairman of Athena’s membership committee and a partner at Deloitte & Touche, says that associate membership in the organization will help prepare women for promotions with the help of women who are already business owners or corporate executives. “It really is a sponsorship opportunity,” Young says. “There weren’t women to mentor us. Now that there are women at the executive level, we want to be the mentors for the 20th century.”

The ranks of Athena are filled with high-powered, confident women who see the group as a forum for brainstorming and strategizing their way through workplace problems. “They don’t always tell you what you want to hear,” says Anne O’Donnell, an Athena board member and director of government business development at Greystone Technology, a developer of sophisticated three-dimensional, multimedia interactive software. “They are just committed to getting the best out of you and the best out of them.”

O’Donnell, a Mount Holyoke graduate with two master’s degrees from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Divinity, says that with the economy booming, companies are hungry for talent, offering qualified women plenty of opportunity. Asked what she thinks about the glass ceiling, she’s reluctant to even acknowledge it. “What ceiling?” she asks. “Give me the mirrors. A glass ceiling is so philosophical. I’m seeing through it, and I’m seeing my potential so far.” And if some day she finds herself stymied in her career? She professes zero tolerance. “If it’s got a glass ceiling, I have to move somewhere else and grow with that organization.”