Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford in 1988's Working Girl | Photo by 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection
One of the first stats always trotted out about women in business is how few run Fortune 500 companies (only 15). But if we're after numbers with a few more digits, enter nurses and teachers. When the first Business Women's Day was celebrated in 1982, 5.9 million women worked in education and health--fewer, surprisingly, than the 6.3 million climbing the corporate ladder in finance and business. Today, that order has been reversed: 12 million women spend the 9-to-5 working toward a corner office, while 15 million serve as educators and health-care providers.