KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Where are the women?

Despite a generation of Take Our Daughters to Work days ...

Despite college and graduate school enrollments among women that exceed those of men ...

Despite a work force participation rate since the mid-1960s that soared like a plane on takeoff so that three-fourths of all working-age women now are in the labor force ...

The upper echelon of U.S. business is still a decidedly male bastion.

For nearly half a century, American women have been educated, role-modeled and networked into the business world yet remain vastly under-represented in corporate board rooms and corner offices.

A Census report in 2003 said fewer than one in five "top-level managers" are women, and women hold only a third of management jobs in general. Various surveys indicate only about one in seven directors of the nation's largest publicly traded companies are women.

"I would say all of us probably have been in that same situation at work our whole lives," said Jeannine Strandjord, one of only a handful of Kansas City area women who serve on the boards of more than one major public company.

"Until the last few years, I was always alone, so we are used to it," said the recently retired senior vice president-financial services of Sprint. She is a director of American Century Mutual Funds and DST Systems Inc., as well as Euronet Worldwide and J.E. Dunn Construction Co.

Strandjord joined other leading women board members from the Kansas City area — Elizabeth Solberg, Karen Pletz and Sandra Lawrence — in a roundtable discussion recently at The Kansas City Star.

The local executives, mirroring the national debate, focused on the continued scarcity of female chief executives — a prime route to corporate board membership. That discussion has spawned a "nature vs. nurture" debate.

On one side are those who say the genetic predisposition of women to be the prime caregivers causes women to opt out of the corporate rat race, to make choices in favor of family.

They note, too, that many brilliant, talented women choose to "mommy track" their jobs or take a break from the job market during their child-raising years, which often are the years when companies fast-track their brightest stars.

On the other side are those who say the old-boy network is taking a glacial time in opening its ranks, and that identification and promotion of top-caliber women has barely advanced beyond tokenism.

"I'm honestly amazed at how strong the glass ceiling is," said Kirk Perucca, a Kansas City diversity consultant. "On a good day I think, 'Well, this just kind of happens.' But on most days, I believe there's intentional exclusion. That's hard to say, but as long as people look in the same traditional places, they'll come up with the same traditional names."

His impression was fortified by a study released in December by the Social Investment Research Analyst Network, a working group of the Social Investment Forum Foundation.

Ten years after the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission recommended disclosure of diversity data to help shatter advancement barriers, the social investment network reported: "The phenomenon of the glass ceiling — significant under-representation of women and minorities within senior management — was affirmed to be a pervasive problem in corporate America."

Advocates say there's a dollars-and-cents reason that men as well as women should embrace the effort to get more women in the board room.

"A Catalyst study of boards with better diversity found that those firms tend to have better shareholder value," said Joan Strewler-Carter, a management consultant who has served in an advisory capacity to boards.

Catalyst, a national nonprofit organization, provides research and advice about expanding opportunities for women at work. It began in 1998 to track the progress of women in corporate leadership.

Catalyst's most recent reports indicate that women represent less than 2 percent of the Fortune 1,000 CEOs and just 1.4 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs. Also, women make up only 15.7 percent of all Fortune 500 corporate officers and only 13.6 percent of Fortune 500 board members.

Workplace statisticians have noticed in the past few years that more women are backing away from top corporate goals and starting their own small businesses.

Demographers say further study is needed to see if the movement away from corporate America was a passing reflection of the four-year job market downturn in big companies or if it's a long-term change in priorities and lifestyle.