In early April, a team from Oregon Business hit the road, traveling more than 800 miles to interview and photograph 28 awe-inspiring Oregonians. There was a round trip to Baker City to shoot a group of ranchers, a visit to Gov. Kulongoski's office to meet his policymaking dream team, and a huddle with a dozen or so grant-grabbing engineers at Oregon State University.

The result is our third annual WOMEN INC., our best — and most visually engaging — yet.

This year we decided to present groups of women, rather than individual women, to make a point. Women are gaining critical mass in key sectors of the Oregon economy. Their collective leadership is making industries grow.

Do they think of themselves as a group? Are they women ranchers, lawyers, administrators, researchers? Or just ranchers, lawyers, administrators and researchers who happen to be women?

There's no easy answer. But our editorial team did come away with some keen insights from the women who were photographed and interviewed.

Political observers have noted that many of the key advisers around the governor are female. Several of these super-capable women joked, as our photographer posed them in the governor's office, that they were so busy, they'd have to send their male assistants as stand-ins for the photo shoot. One said, a bit tongue-in-cheek, that the work is so consuming that any woman who doesn't already have a husband when she joins the governor's staff won't have time to find one once she's in the job.

The women we gathered in Eastern Oregon truly do it all — growing wheat, running irrigation districts and cattlewomen's associations, raising cattle, raising families. One of the women confessed that, having taken care of her children and now her grandchildren, she questions more deeply whether she can bring calves into the world every spring, care for them, then send them off to the slaughterhouse.

In this issue's INPUT, we also deliver the results of an online forum of female Oregon Business readers. The women reported being preoccupied with balancing their obligations to children, spouses and elderly parents with their obligations to companies and co-workers. These women want to get ahead, make more money, contribute to the bottom line, work their butts off, but they also want to be responsible partners, wives, mothers and daughters.

One of the women told of a boss who sent his assistant to the parking lot to find out if a job applicant had a child safety seat in her car, assuming that a woman with a kid wouldn't give 110% for the company. The boss was surely discriminating, and he was dead wrong about what women with families will do for a family-friendly employer. But his belief is still all too prevalent among male (and even sometimes female) man-agers. And women are still responsible for much of the care giving and housework in middle-class families, even when they work full time outside the home.

I believe that solving this dilemma is not primarily a women's problem. Only if we all do it all — both men and women — will our families and companies thrive. Some day, it'll be your male CEO who calls in to cancel all his appointments because his 8-year-old daughter has strep and her mom has to give her weekly engineering lecture to 300 freshmen. Until then, we'll keep doing WOMEN INC. to celebrate what women are accomplishing at work in Oregon.

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Copyright 2005 Oregon Business magazine