After prodding by a group of women business executives and civic leaders, the five Pittsburgh mayoral candidates publicly pledged yesterday that at least half their appointees to city boards, commissions and nonelected positions would be women.

Faced with complaints that the city's political and business communities are less than hospitable to women, the mayoral hopefuls -- all of them men -- told members of the Executive Women's Council that they were committed to achieving gender equity in the region, from political appointments to political candidacies to female entrepreneurship.

Despite the upbeat promises from Democrats Bob O'Connor, Michael Lamb, Bill Peduto and Hop Kendrick and Republican Joseph Weinroth, the current situation is "a pretty bleak picture," said Sara Davis Buss, a local attorney who served for three years on the county's Sports & Exhibition Authority.

While it is important to appoint more women overall to boards, authorities and commissions, what's more important, she told the candidates, is that more women chair them. With one or two exceptions, none of them do.

"It's very important to the economic future of this region that we are able to point to the leaders and chairwomen of various organizations and tell our daughters and women who want to move here from other regions that, 'Yes, there is a possibility of success for you,' because yes, we can point to examples of that. Today we have no examples of that," Buss said.

The candidates' public pledges yesterday resulted from meetings over the past few months with members of the council and the Women and Girls Foundation, a philanthropic group dedicated to achieving gender equity in the region.

Frustrated by the all-male appointments last year to the city's fiscal oversight board, the foundation -- along with the Women's Executive Council, the YWCA, the NAACP and other organizations -- decided to start lobbying the state Legislature, the governor's office, counties and local governments to adopt a process modeled on the state of Iowa, in which appointments must reflect the diversity of the local population.

"Women are very well educated and well informed in this region," said Hilda Pang Fu, one of the Women and Girls Foundation's founding board members. "But here in Pittsburgh, it's just ridiculous. ... We're still not being taken as seriously as men are."

The foundation did not approach Mayor Tom Murphy, who is leaving office next year, about the issue, said Heather Arnet, the foundation's executive director.

Murphy has appointed some women to prominent positions, including city Solicitor Jacqueline Morrow, Planning Director Susan Golomb and former Finance Director Ellen McLean.

But Morrow, who attended the luncheon, said politicians and power brokers relied too heavily on a small pool of candidates, and when challenged, complained that too few qualified women or minorities were available.

"There's always a list of the usual suspects, the same four black women or white women whose names get offered up," Morrow said. "We don't expand the base of names; instead we just see the same people over and over again, and that's the bigger problem. It happens to white men, too."

According to the 2004 Women's Benchmarking Report at the University of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh region has one of the proportionately largest and most educated female work forces in the nation. But a separate study by the Coro Center for Civic Leadership also found that while women made up 53 percent of Allegheny County's population and 69 percent of the city's working adults, they held only 31 percent of the county's nonelected positions.

While no studies of female membership on city boards, authorities and commissions have been conducted, O'Connor read his own list of examples at the luncheon: one woman on the six-member Urban Redevelopment Authority; two on the six-member Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority; one on the seven-member Citizen Police Review Board; two on the five-member Pittsburgh Parking Authority; and three -- one of them a member of City Council -- on the seven-member Pittsburgh Housing Authority.

Women workers and business owners also face obstacles here, said Arnet, citing studies that show the region's female work force still lags behind other comparable regions in wages, and that Pittsburgh's gender wage gap is the seventh worst in the nation out of the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

While there is by no means a consensus on the subject, some women at the luncheon complained that female entrepreneurs had more difficulty than men in starting up their own businesses.

Carol Lampe, a financial planner, recalled fruitless meetings with city officials in the early 1990s in an effort to win contracts to manage a portion of the city's retirement funds for her women-owned business, which has since disbanded.

"I followed up with phone calls until I was blue in the face," she said, "and finally I gave up. I figured I have to eat today, and I can't wait 10 years until things change, so I moved on."

Bonnie Rack-Wildner, who owns Akoya, a strategic planning and communications firm on the South Side, remembered a frustrating encounter with a major lending group in the region when she sought to buy a women-owned family business in 2000.

A female employee of the lending group had approved her application for a loan but then left the company, and the group of men who replaced her "talked to us like we were 2-year-olds, forcing us to jump through all sorts of new hoops."

Finally, Rack-Wildner's attorney -- a man -- called in his own personal contacts at the lending firm and her loan was approved.

"The rules are different here for women," she said.

Her experience, and others like it, made Rack-Wildner view yesterday's luncheon presentation by the mayoral candidates with some cynicism.

"I think I have been listening to politicians talk about women's issues for too long," she said.

"Unfortunately for these gentlemen, it's just too hard for me to hear them say something that doesn't sound like a politically correct sound bite," Rack-Wildner said. "I don't trust that once they're in office anything will change, because we haven't changed in the past."