WOMEN ARE BREADWINNERS : GLOBAL SUMMIT PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON FEMALES' UNSEEN ECONOMIC POWER.

Byline: Patty Henetz The Salt Lake Tribune

They are facts to ponder: 55 percent of all North American women with jobs outside the home contribute at least half their families' total incomes. In Europe, 29 percent of working wives make more money than their husbands.

This is so even though women, on average, make no more than 75 cents for every dollar a man makes. Even though most of them work only part-time for $25,000 or less per year. Even though only 2 percent of working women hold senior positions.

And even the savviest women have trouble understanding how all that translates into economic power and workplace obstacles, which is a reason why some 500 women from 56 countries are in Miami for the fourth Global Summit of Women.

``We're so used to feeling out of it, out of the power centers, that the notion of being economically powerful is amazing to women. It is a big hidden secret we want to call attention to,'' said summit director Irene Natividad. ``We can no longer ignore the problems of women in the work force that impede women precisely because they are the new providers.''

Most of those meeting at Miami's Hotel Intercontinental are in private enterprise or lead nongovernmental organizations. Invited luminaries include feminist icons Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug, former Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro and top government and corporate officials from the Philippines, Japan and South America.

Attendees are reviewing their roles as business leaders, workers, entrepreneurs and consumers during seminars on alternative-credit programs, global business opportunities, strategies for global economic change, and much corporate advertising that still addresses women in 1950s terms.

In short, they want the world to understand that the female half of the population works for more than pin money.

The summit's focus has particular resonance for the West, whose prodigious growth is based on jobs fueling the world economy: computer and communication technology, tourism and increased attention to foreign trade.

The first Global Summit of Women in 1990, held in Montreal, was sponsored by the Canadian government and focused on the importance of nongovernmental organizations. In 1992, the summit moved to Dublin, Ireland, to study how women's leadership differs from men's. In Taiwan in 1994, attendees examined women's political power. The current summit originally was scheduled for 1996 in Barcelona, but changes in Spain's government voided the arrangements.

Organizers previously have avoided holding the summit in the United States because of the American disposition to see international changes as not salient to their lives.

``It is the perception of being No. 1 and therefore not having to know much about anyone else around us,'' said the summit director, Natividad, head of the National Commission on Working Women.

The fourth Global Summit of Women is not directly linked to the fourth World Conference of Women that was held in Beijing in 1995, a gathering that drew 36,000 people and ended with a statement of policy signed by 189 nations. There, women were subject to United Nations rules and hewed to express national and international policies.

``Beijing was a happening, a call to women to come together,'' Natividad said.

But she said it is time to winnow the realities from the rhetoric, something that could never be done at a meeting of 36,000, and to hone in on topics that cut across political, domestic and gender differences.

``I am now convinced,'' she said, ``that public policy alone is not enough to change women's lives.''