It's 5:30 a.m. and Dawn Lepore is already up and checking e-mails from her Seattle home office. As CEO of drugstore.com Inc., she puts in an hour or two of work while her 4-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son are still asleep.

Her husband, Ken, brings her a cup of coffee - a tradition he has maintained for 10 years - as she peruses company files. After a quick breakfast with her kids, her husband gets them off to school, and Lepore heads to her Bellevue office. She'll work through dinner, preparing a Lean Cuisine in the office kitchen, and get home by 7:30 or 8:30 p.m., in time to tuck her son into bed. She'll usually work a few more hours before calling it a night.

It's a hectic, tiring and sometimes frustrating routine of 12- to 15-hour workdays. But it's a fast-paced, high-profile lifestyle that the 53-year-old Lepore embraces.

In addition to running drugstore.com - a $415 million online provider of health and wellness products - Lepore serves on the board of eBay. She spent 21 years with the brokerage firm Charles Schwab & Co. in San Francisco, rising to vice chairman of technology and administration, and gaining notoriety as one of Fortune Magazine's 50 Most Powerful Women in American Business four years in a row.

It wasn't an easy climb, however, and she admits that without the support of her hus- band, mentors and friends, she wouldn't have been able to pursue her dream of becoming a CEO. "It's harder as a woman to prove yourself as a senior executive," Lepore says, noting that "as you grow up as an executive, people's perceptions of you are slow to change."

Despite her success - she recently got a raise to $400,000 a year - Lepore says the corporate road for many women is still bumpy, leaving them far behind their male counterparts in salary and executive positions held.

She is not alone in her sentiments. Washington CEO Magazine interviews with more than two dozen female senior executives, business owners, community leaders, middle managers and business experts show that most believe women in corporate America, including Washington state, are woefully underrepresented in top corporate positions. Or, as the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Women's Policy Research puts it, women appear to be "running faster to stay in place."

Unlike many women business owners who have bypassed the glass ceiling by creating their own companies - and amassing six- and seven-figure salaries in the process - senior women executives in large public companies are still rare. "Progress has been made, but it has been glacial," says Kara Helander, the western regional vice president for Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit organization that studies women in the workforce.

For the last 25 years, women have become an increasingly important part of the professional workforce, earning half of all law degrees, 40 percent of medical degrees and a third of M.B.A.s, Helander says. But that growth rate has fallen over the last three years. "We have a situation where women are a growing force in the talent pool, yet their growth has been stalled."

Of the 63 million working women in the U.S., only 1.8 percent of the nation's largest companies have women chief executives, according to Catalyst. In addition, women hold only 14.7 percent of all Fortune 500 board seats, and 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies still have no women board members. "At the current rate, it will take women another 70 years to reach parity with men on Fortune 500 boards," says Catalyst President Ilene Lange.