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In her new job, 9to5 founder Nussbaum is still helping women balance work and family responsibilities.

When Karen Nussbaum, director of the Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor, was introduced recently to a group of activists by Deputy Director Delores Crockett, Crockett said, "We always used to have to sit down the new political appointee and explain what working women's issues were. This woman didn't have to be broken in."

Indeed, Nussbaum was spurred to activism while a secretary at Harvard University in 1973. She was alone in the office one day when "a male student came in, looked me right in the eye, and asked, 'Isn't anybody here?'" Soon afterward, she founded 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, with the goal of organizing "pink-collar" workers to improve their wages and working conditions.

Nussbaum toiled for years as an outsider-advocate for women. Now she speaks from the inside, having been appointed to the bureau by Bill Clinton last year. She's the driving force behind "Working Women Count!," a groundbreaking survey being distributed to millions of American women in the workforce and at home via labor unions, businesses, activist groups, and the media. Results are due out in October, and will help Nussbaum determine public policy for the nation's 58 million working women. (For a copy of the survey's findings, call the Women's Bureau at 1-800-827-5335.)

Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Nussbaum's immediate boss, is a strong supporter of her work with average working women. By contrast, Labor Secretaries Elizabeth Dole and Lynn Martin focused on upper management women's woes with a "Glass Ceiling Initiative."
