"Every other day, he'd come into my office kidding me, `If you don't have a baby soon, I will fire you,' " said Julie Smolyansky, now 27, the chief executive of Lifeway Foods Inc. in Morton Grove, Ill., a $10.7 million manufacturer of specialized dairy products and other natural foods.

For Katie Brown Blackburn, executive vice president of the Cincinnati Bengals and heir apparent to the team's throne, it is not so much her father's joshing as his childhood nickname for her: "Pumpky."

"You never know who he's going to say it in front of, but there are some times when I wish he wouldn't," said Ms. Blackburn, 37, who is responsible for negotiating player contracts and overseeing the team's radio and television networks.

Carolyn Martini, the chief executive of the Louis M. Martini Winery in St. Helena, Calif., wasn't so circumspect about her father's comments. On her first week on the job, "He said something that set me off," she recalled. "I yelled, he yelled, and we both went huffing off. Then we realized if we're going to work together, we can't do this. Both of us apologized simultaneously."

Of the nation's 500 largest publicly traded companies, only six, or 1.2 percent, are run by women. That compares with 9.5 percent of 30,000 family businesses surveyed by the George & Robin Raymond Family Business Institute and four other groups. And 34 percent of the respondents in that poll said their next C.E.O. might be a woman.

In family businesses of all sizes, chief-executive fathers are molding their daughters in their own images. Belinda Stronach runs Magna International Inc., an $11 billion auto parts maker founded by her father, Frank. Abigail Johnson is now president of FMR, parent of Fidelity Investments, the giant fund management company, and analysts expect her to succeed her father, Edward C. Johnson III, 72, as chairman.

The fact that women fail to reach the top of most of America's largest public companies, but often take charge of the family business, doesn't surprise Ellen Frankenberg, a family-business psychologist and the chief executive of Business Family Solutions in Cincinnati. At big corporations, she said, women executives often lack mentors, while fathers who run family companies are more likely to nurture the entrepreneurial gene in their daughters, often when they are still in grade school. "Dad can bring his daughter to that golf outing and can spend long hours coaching her," she said.

For Katie Ford, chief executive of Ford Models Inc., the New York agency and her childhood home were almost interchangeable. Her parents, Eileen and Gerard Ford, began representing models in 1946, and she remembers meeting the industry's movers and shakers around the family's dining-room table. "We used to have lunches for models, photographers, designers and stylists for at least 40 people every Saturday and 20, 30 on Sunday," she said. She played table tennis with French photographers, chatted with editors from Vogue and went to a fashion show in Rome when she was 11.

After stints in television and management consulting, Ms. Ford joined the family business at 28 and took the top job in 1995 by mutual agreement with her older brother, Bill. "Because of my management consulting background, it made sense that I would run it, and my brother would handle sales," said Ms. Ford, now 47.

The education of Ms. Smolyansky in the family business also started at an early age. By the time she was 12, she was traveling with her father to trade shows, talking to customers and helping to set up displays. At one show, she recalled, the woman in the next booth was the daughter of Lee A. Iacocca, the former chief executive of Chrysler, who had just started a wine company.

After college, Ms. Smolyansky joined Lifeway, which is publicly traded but controlled by her family, as sales and marketing director. Her father taught her the tricks of the trade through verbal sparring.

"We fought about the color of product labels," she said. "If we were preparing an ad, we debated about whether the model should be wearing a pink shirt or a blue shirt."

In June, Mr. Smolyansky died of a heart attack, and the board immediately installed his daughter as C.E.O. "I thought I'd have another 20 years; he had so much life and energy and creativity," she said.

Death also figured in the career of Ms. Blackburn, the Cincinnati Bengals executive. Though she received a law degree and worked for a law firm for a time, football was in her blood. Her grandfather, the legendary coach Paul Brown, founded the Bengals when Katie was 3. As a child, she attended practices and talked to players. She spent more time with her father, Mike, at the stadium than on vacation. In high school, she sat with him and her grandfather as they negotiated players' contracts. At Dartmouth, she played rugby.

In 1991, when her grandfather died and her father took over, she joined the team as corporate secretary and legal counsel. Since then, the Bengals have fared poorly on the field, posting one of the worst records in the National Football League, but she is philosophical about the criticism she hears. "You can't let it bring you down too much," she said.

Some women are forced by circumstances to take charge of the family business. "It can happen by accident — dad dies, the brother gets drunk one too many times, so daughters put off their own plans and assume business responsibilities," said Ms. Frankenberg, the consultant.

MS. MARTINI, the California vintner, knows about shifting gears. In 1975, she was managing the inventory for Rutgers University's central library when her father asked her to come home to the Napa Valley. Her grandfather, the founder of the business, had died, and he needed help. "I wasn't programmed to be in the wine business," she said. "Italian girls get married and have kids."