Sandra Yates has climbed to the top of a male dominated corporate world by never taking the easy road. On Friday afternoons in the early 1980s, when most of The Sun newspaper's advertising department had drifted across the road to the Clare (their local watering hole), someone always stayed behind.

One of the 30 men from the now defunct tabloid daily would wait for their boss to finish work so they could escort her to the pub along Sydney's Broadway.

After all, it wasn't the done thing for a lady to walk into a public bar alone.

While she found it funny, Sandra Yates, now the chairwoman of Saatchi & Saatchi, appreciated the chivalrous gesture.

''I still think it's absolutely charming," she said. "I got such a nice note from the former deputy ad manager of The Sun, John Hannaford, just before Christmas, reminding me of the good times.

" He reminded me of the first time someone had waited and dutifully escorted me into the pub. I'd proceeded to drink six schooners and evidently that had made a great impression on them."

Yates, then The Sun's advertising manager, was (with the secretary) one of two women in the department. When she started there, the male staff were "astonished to find themselves working for a woman."

"They handled that pretty well, but it was a shock for us all,'' Yates said. Twenty years on, Yates, 54, is one of the most influential and noteworthy people in the Australian corporate world.

In addition to her role as chairwoman at one of Australia's top advertising agencies, she is chair of the NSW TAFE Commission Board, chair of this year's Sydney Writers' Festival, a member of the AFA (Advertising Federation of Australia) National Board and a member of the AFA Ethics Working Party, a board member of Musica Viva, and she was recently appointed to the board of the Taronga (Zoo) Foundation.

During her career, Yates has been publisher of Time magazine (Australia) and deputy chief executive officer of Fairfax Magazines.

When, in 1998, the State Chamber of Commerce asked 240 business leaders to pick the most powerful women in Australia from a list of 20, Yates was in the top 10. She is also in the Australian Who's Who. It has been a stellar rise through industries (sales and then publishing) which, in the 70s and early 80s, were predominantly male.

And it is all the more admirable because of how it was achieved - through drive, determination, focus, and plain old hard work.

Leaving school at the end of Year 10, Yates, the daughter of a Brisbane market gardener, worked as a secretary, married at 18 and had her first child, Anne, at 20.

By 27, the marriage had ended, Yates's second child, Matthew, was a toddler and she found herself as the sole breadwinner. It was then that her career aspirations began.

"It was a growing realisation that poverty as a lifestyle option is just horrible and that Prince Charming, if not late, was at least seriously delayed and that if it was going to get any better, I'd have to do it myself," she said. "I've never had a cent of government support or a cent of maintenance from the kids' fathers, so trying to keep them on my salary was not an easy thing to do."

"I guess if there's anything that makes me wake up screaming in the middle of the night, it's the fear of poverty because it so limits your options. It's so boring; you can't do anything."

Joining Saatchi & Saatchi as a director in 1996, Yates was appointed chairwoman within the year. "The job," she said, "requires being an independent adviser to the executive of a company - the role is more strategic than operational - and making sure everyone's staying on track and focused.

"The chief executive, David Ansell, is responsible for the day-to-day running of the organisation but the particular things I look after are media, government, and new business and I have a particular responsibility for the Australian Labor Party."

It was Yates's influence that won Saatchi & Saatchi the ALP advertising account for the 1998 Federal election. John Singleton's agency, Singleton, Ogilvy, and Mather, was reportedly shocked to lose the account they had held for 11 years.

While Yates believes the portrayal of women in advertising takes into account the diversity of their roles much more than it used to, she does not think that advertising "has any particular ideological bent, it really is there to reflect society as it sees it".

But she said outdoor advertising was "dragging the chain" by being "one dimensional and unhelpful" towards women.

Complaints were once dealt with by the Advertising Standards Council, which had the power to force advertisers to remove ads it deemed offensive. It was disbanded in 1997 and replaced with the Advertising Standards Bureau which is regulated by the advertising industry itself. "I must say I find the revamped ASB much more inclined to let market forces prevail and it has rejected far fewer ads than its predecessor," she said. " In my view that is a matter of regret. We have a responsibility to the community we serve. I think all advertising, as indeed everything we do in business ought to reflect people's humanity and innate human dignity."

Yates said one of the most useful things she had learnt during her career was that ''patience is a strategic weapon, as opposed to a refuge to people who haven't got the courage to make a decision, which is what I always used to think it was."

"That has been a real insight for me," she said. "I'm much more inclined these days to understand that not everything needs to be resolved immediately, that ambiguity can be good for us and to be much more willing to allow events to play themselves out, rather than try to force them to a conclusion."

As a placard-waving women's rights supporter in the 1970s, Yates believes young women are now in a "period of transition."

"I love it that young women do seem so confident and think that they don't need feminism and they can do anything they like, but the jury's still out on that," she said.

"After 30 or 40 years of women surging into the workplace, the evidence is we are still chronically underrepresented at the top levels of business and on boards, so I don't believe that time delivers equity for women.

"I could be wrong and young women may discover that their sheer weight of numbers will ensure that they get through, but there's no evidence to support that."

Yates's own road to the top was filled with obstacles. When she worked as a secretary in Brisbane, a colleague thought she would have a talent for sales and recommended her for a job selling advertising space at Channel 10.

It meant travelling out of Queensland for the first time and moving to Sydney with two children in tow. It was 1975 and, while she blossomed in the new role (''anyone who has ever persuaded a two-year-old to eat spinach can sell anything,") her boss told her he would never promote a woman. "These days [women] have the legal protection," Yates said. "It's only 20-odd years ago that people could say that to you with impunity."

When she moved on to Family Circle in 1978, she was its first female salesperson and soon became national sales manager.

While her work was going well, it was a different story at home. "The loneliest times were at night after the kids had gone to bed with no adults to talk to," she said. ''I always had a horror of single mothers who took rotations of 'uncles' home, so for many years I didn't date, didn't do anything. That was pretty isolating."

Prince Charming did turn up though. Through Family Circle, Yates met media buyer Michael Skinner, now 57. When the couple married 20 years ago, Skinner took on the role of stepfather to Anne, now 33 and a web content provider working in Singapore, and Matthew, 28, a musician.

It was the second marriage for Yates, the first for Skinner. With great happiness and pride, Yates said that Matthew recently asked Skinner if he would officially adopt him.

Yates hopes her career future includes more directorships and a continued involvement with the arts. "I feel very blessed at the moment. I'm almost contented: I wouldn't quite know what to do with myself if that happened."