Tracing her 30-year rise through the ranks of U.S. Steel Corp., Gretchen Haggerty named a handful of male financial executives at the company who mentored her along her way to being named the steelmaker's first female officer in 1991.

There were women, too, who lent strong career support -- especially other female attorneys with whom she worked in her early years at the company. But Mrs. Haggerty, 51, was the first woman at U.S. Steel to make the leap to the executive offices.

Perhaps if there had been other women in top executive roles at the steel company before her, Mrs. Haggerty may have realized the value of a good golf game in a business dominated by men.

"It was a huge mistake not to learn how to play golf earlier in my career," she admitted during a lunchtime address at the Duquesne Club yesterday, where she was one of the featured speakers at "Breaking the Glass Ceiling," an event sponsored by Duquesne University's Beard Center for Leadership in Ethics.

In 2003, Mrs. Haggerty was named executive vice president, treasurer and chief financial officer of U.S. Steel. She dropped the treasurer's title in 2004.

The Mt. Lebanon native described herself as "a born over-achiever" whose parents instilled her with a mantra of hard work and education. She had enough Advanced Placement credits to graduate a year early from Case Western Reserve University with an accounting degree, and joined U.S. Steel as a management trainee in 1976. She earned a law degree at night school at Duquesne University while working full-time. She is married to an attorney at Reed Smith and has two daughters ages 16 and 10.

Though it was a traditional company run by men, her bosses provided her with career-making opportunities, Mrs. Haggerty said, including corporate finance work on the $6.2 billion acquisition of Marathon Oil Co. in 1982, the $3 billion purchase of and Texas Oil & Gas Corp. in 1986, and the eventual separation of U.S. Steel and Marathon into independent companies effective in 2002.

One of her mentors was the late W. Bruce Thomas, who was the CFO when she started working at U.S. Steel. "He was respectful of women in the business before it was popular," she said.

Among the career tips she gleaned from him were to communicate well through writing and speaking, maintain a sense of humor, serve on boards of charitable organizations and "save your outrage ? so it's more effective when you use it."

Also relaying her experiences as a woman advancing in a traditional male environment was Major General Jessica Wright, adjutant general for Pennsylvania's Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.

A Monessen native who rose through the military after enlisting in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard in 1975, Maj. Gen. Wright told the crowd she "would rather be in Iraq under fire than here talking about my career."

Her current job, a state cabinet position, includes commanding and supervising all of the state's Air and Army National Guard units, state-owned veterans' homes and programs for the state's veterans.

"The last 32 years I spent in the Army, I didn't think about the glass ceiling," she said. "There is no magic potion to get you over the hurdles or through the ceiling. It takes hard work, perseverance and humor."