GTE's corporate headquarters brings fifth Take Our Daughters to Work Day to the Internet; girls gain confidence from workplace and mentors

STAMFORD, Conn. -- GTE corporate headquarters' fifth annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day, being held here today, is designed to bolster adolescent girls' self-confidence and takes them into cyberspace.

GTE will welcome 80 girls ages 9-17 to its Stamford world headquarters for a program that includes company overviews, workshops on career-related and general interpersonal skills, and the opportunity to accompany and receive individual mentoring from selected GTE employees as these employees work.

This year, in an acknowledgment of the growing role of technology in the workplace and society, a group of the girls will interview GTE employees for a writing workshop and post their articles on the GTE World Wide Web site (http://www.gte.com/Glance/daughters/index.html) at the end of the day.

The Web page, which demonstrates GTE's commitment to encouraging women to pursue interests in high technology (a field where women are underrepresented), will be the official record of Take Our Daughters to Work Day at the company.

GTE's corporate headquarters program is designed to support the programs original intent. The Ms. Foundation for Women started Take Our Daughters to Work Day as a proactive remedy to a problem identified several years ago by Harvard psychologists: as girls reach adolescence, they tend to lose self-esteem and report that they feel increasingly insecure about their judgment and emotions. Therefore, while one of the event's collateral benefits is that girls learn more about careers, its main purpose is much broader -- to focus positive adult attention on the participants, to urge girls to speak their minds and to trust their own judgment, and even to develop positive mentor relationships with successful GTE employees.

Maria and Christina Crapanzano find that GTE's Daughters Day activities give them added confidence on school projects. Maria, 13, who was a reporter for last year's Daughters Day newsletter, said she learned valuable interviewing, note-taking and organizational skills that served her well on a similar assignment in her 8th grade social studies class.

"Thanks to what I learned at GTE, I knew how to shorten down my notes and put them in order, and I got an A+ on my school project," she said.

Christina, 10, derived similar benefits from working with new computer programs at the 1996 Take Our Daughters to Work Day. When she encountered similar programs in her 5th grade class, she knew how to put them in the right format. "I had a lot of fun last year," she recalls.

This year, participants will begin their day at GTE with an overview of the company and will then disperse to attend a variety of workshops including "Interview Workshop," "Advertising -- More Than Meets the Eye," and "Pay Day - Dollars and Sense." Later, some participants will accompany GTE mentors as these employees go about their work. Older girls can choose from a selection of tailored workshops on writing and presentation skills: they will do the reporting for the special newsletter and World Wide Web page covering the event.

With revenues of more than $21 billion in 1996, GTE is one of the largest publicly-held telecommunications companies in the world. In the United States, GTE offers local and wireless services in 29 states and long-distance service in all 50 states. GTE was the first among its peers to offer "one-stop shopping" for local, long-distance and Internet-access services. Outside the United States, where GTE has operated for more than 40 years, the company serves over 6.5 million customers. GTE is also a leader in government and defense communications systems and equipment, directories and telecommunications-based information services, and aircraft-passenger telecommunications.

GTE supports the efforts of the Ms. Foundation and other organizations that have created a special lesson plan for teachers to use with boys on Daughters Day; some GTE units have elected to include boys in the April 24 program.

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