Martha Ruiz emerges confidently from the back of a long black
limousine and places her sparkly, strappy sandals on the red carpet—the
red carpet. Minutes later, Oprah is to her right, Clint Eastwood to her
left. It's everything Martha ever imagined Oscar night would be: the
ultimate glam and glitz in a sea of photo flash and snap. "So, I was
standing next to Oprah Winfrey, trying to be calm and cool on the
outside," recalls Martha, an accountant and mom to 18-month-old
daughter Monet Catherine. "But what kept popping into my head was
whether or not my husband would be able to get the baby to sleep
without my being there."

Martha, a director in the tax department at PricewaterhouseCoopers
in Los Angeles, is one of a handpicked team of accountants in the
company's entertainment practice who oversee and tabulate votes for the
Academy Awards (which will be
broadcast on Sunday, March 5, at 5:00 p.m. PST on ABC). This year marks
Martha's fourth on the Oscar team. After the ballots are received, she
and nine other PwC accountants hunker down at an undisclosed location
until all the votes have been counted, recounted and counted once more.
The group is sequestered for a full week and allowed to go home only to
sleep, to make sure the top-secret results are not divulged before
showtime. Like motherhood, Martha's job takes her from the mundane to
the sublime. "I deal with numbers all day," she says. "So to be able to
go to the Oscars every year is very Cinderella-like to me." A big movie
buff, Martha loves romantic comedies and actor Andy Garcia. "I'm always
looking for him on Oscar night," she says. Consolation: She met Billy
Crystal, who starred in When Harry Met Sally, her all-time favorite
film.

As a child, Martha never envisioned such princess moments for
herself. The third of four daughters, she was born in Los Angeles and
raised by loving immigrant parents: Her father is a native of Peru, and
her mother was born in Mexico. They taught Martha and her sisters that
success comes from hard work and a good education. And there was never
any question that she and her sisters would attend college. "My parents
really wanted us to have the means and the independence to take care of
ourselves."

For Martha, that translated to a major in business administration
with an emphasis in accounting at California State University, Los
Angeles. After graduating in 1994, she passed the difficult, two-day
certified public accountant (CPA) examination and went on to graduate
school. PricewaterhouseCoopers in Los Angeles recruited Martha in 1997,
right after she had earned a master's degree in taxation from Golden
Gate University in San Francisco. Two years later, Martha married her
college sweetheart, Javier, who is a mechanical engineer.

In the years that followed, Martha quickly scaled the ranks of
PricewaterhouseCoopers, a Working Mother 100 Best Company for 11 years.
She started as an associate accountant and now holds the position of
director, one notch below partner. When Monet, named after the famous
artist, was born in June 2004, Martha worried about how she would
handle the demands of a challenging job and motherhood. "The summer my
daughter was born, I was promoted," Martha explains. "I knew that the
firm had pretty good programs for new moms, including flexible hours
and child-care referral. But I had to rein myself in to take advantage
of them." Like many working women, Martha was used to pushing herself
"a hundred miles per hour, trying to be a super-woman and do it all."
Martha also struggled with a typical new-mom concern: If she took too
much time off with the baby, would her peers question her career
commitment? If she hard-charged back to work, would she feel she was
slighting her child? But her fears were soon allayed by two of the
firm's male partners—Kenneth Rem, a father of grown children, and Rick
Rosas. Shortly after Monet's birth, the men sat Martha down and told
her that she should feel free to adjust her schedule to accommodate her
new life. "They encouraged me to take off the time I needed, be aware
of my work schedule and make sure I wasn't trying to do too much," she
recalls. "This was huge because I know that flexible schedules are
impossible without the support of the people you report to directly."
She also sought mentorship from a woman partner, Susan Leonard, who was
recommended to Martha by her male supervisors. "This was helpful
because there are things about balancing work and home that only
another woman can understand." For instance, Susan told Martha to "stop
working at five or six, go be with my daughter, then put her to bed and
work after she's asleep—if I need to."

Since returning to PwC four months after Monet was born, Martha has
been able to work from home a few times a month, come into the office
after the standard morning "rush" and leave her desk early. "It's
alleviated a lot of the tension and stress of being a new mom," she
says, adding that she takes advantage of the firm's benefit of an
additional 15 days of parental time off, which "really helped me carve
out days to bond with my daughter." Martha says she also has the best
day-care providers in the world—her own mother and father. "There's no
one I trust more," she says. "Besides, my mom knows all the moments I
would hate to miss, like when Monet picked up her spoon for the first
time. Mom called me and gave me a rundown." Martha's parents also fill
in as backup-care providers when something comes up at the firm on
short notice or during the busy tax season.

PwC helped ease Martha's transition back to work by providing her
with a lactation specialist, who gave her suggestions on how to pump
throughout the day in the firm's "mother's room" for nursing moms. The
company's attention to these personal needs has made Martha feel that
PwC wants to support and retain working moms like herself. "This just
made me want to work all the harder for them," she says. And she does.
During the week her team is away counting the Oscar votes, "we walk in
excited to be part of the Academy Awards and walk out happy to get home
to our families. It's a long week," Martha admits. "I miss my daughter
terribly. But hopefully the pride I take in my job will someday be a
great lesson for her." When Martha finally returns home, she happily
takes over baby duties from husband Javier and fends off his burning
curiosity: "Who won?" he always probes. "I tell him that I love him and
thank him for taking such good care of our child," Martha says. "Then I
say that my lips are sealed!"