Say 'businesswoman' in a Russian bar, and people still assume you mean 'prostitute'. But that's changing. Chris Stephen meets a group of women breaking through Russia's glass ceiling

My image of a Russian tycoon was a fat, balding man with a vodka bottle in one hand and the deeds to a foreign football club in the other. Until now, that is.

Because racing up on the outside of Moscow's famously corrupt business landscape is a new breed of entrepreneurs with a key difference; these tycoons are women.

Self-made and hard-working, they have made their fortunes the old-fashioned way - with imagination and commitment - and have banded together to form a powerful new organisation, the 20 Committee, to encourage younger women to follow in their footsteps.

Chairwoman and leading light is Anna Belova, the very image of the new kind of company director. She took on, and defeated, a succession of male taboos, choosing mathematics at university and rising to become head of a firm that sells Russian nuclear technology abroad.

"In Russia a woman has an advantage," she tells me as we sit in her walnut-panelled office and are served coffee - by a man. "A woman is more focused on the final result." In her 20s, Belova battled her way into college to study maths, an almost exclusively male preserve which required women to get higher results than men simply to enter. When the country was turned upside-down by the jettisoning of communism for something approaching capitalism, she got herself appointed as a director of JSC RZD, the ailing state railway company.

"I was the first female director," she says. "The way they did business until then was for the boss to say 'do this, do that' and 'you're fired'. I was more analytical." Her business method might sound straightforward: listening to colleagues, delegating responsibility and learning the nitty-gritty of the business, from spreadsheets to the design of railway wagons. In Russia it was nothing short of revolutionary, especially the bit about listening to the customer.

"I live by this - if you are professional, you will be successful, if you are not professional, you will fail." The result was soaring profits. The idea of joining with other businesswomen to promote the cause came a long time ago, but she was dismayed by visits to feminist groups in the West.

"Too many women's groups complain all the time about the problem, they do not come up with solutions, this is their flaw," she says. "We want a synergy effect for self-made women." Then she and two friends came across an American group named the Committee of 200, used by some of the most powerful businesswomen in the US. "We wanted to be more modest, so we decided on 20," says Belova.

Members include the heads of banks, factories, a fitness club, a gallery and the chairwoman of the Russian branch of Microsoft.

There is a certain loneliness to being a woman in charge of a big enterprise here. Being the boss means men finally take you seriously, but there are other obstacles, not least the tradition among some male business leaders of holding meetings in steamy saunas, with prostitutes and vodka laid on.

"We have a similar set of values," says Belova of the 20 Committee. "I think all of us have very inquisitive personalities."

Then there is Russia's infamous business environment. Corruption in this country has got worse, not better, since the arrival of tough-guy president Vladimir Putin, with Transparency International rating Russia as the most corrupt spot in Europe - a tie with Albania. And when Russians talk of a hostile takeover, they mean it - at one stage the rate of assassinations of company bosses by their rivals was running at one a week in St Petersburg, a city still nicknamed "Russia's murder capital".

And in Russia, sexual harassment means something more than dealing with a creepy boss.

Nadejda Kopytina, boss of a frozen food company, found this out 20 years ago. Aged 16, she went to Lvov, now in Ukraine, hoping to find work. She was given a place to stay by men who then took her identity card and demanded sex - a practice still common among women heading west. Kopytina refused and in the end they let her go.

"It was one hell of a motivation," she says. "This sort of humiliation is so common for Russian women. For a long time I was ashamed that such things happened to me. But later I understood that in Russia these things happen and you can cry about it but it will not help. Now I know that if you go through all these humiliations, anything is possible."

But forget that froth about the "woman's touch" providing the winning formula. Kopytina, who gives lectures to young businesswomen, says success boils down to hard work and adaptability.

"I tell them that women have a big advantage," she says. "Women have this great quality, they are more capable of adjusting to changes."

Kopytina's road to success began when, free of the pimps of Lvov, she began travelling in and out of Russia with huge bundles of clothing, a common trading job for those without connections. She discovered she was better than most at sizing up profit margins, and moved into the food industry.

On an aircraft she met a Lithuanian, married him and went into business importing frozen food.

The marriage later fell apart, but her company thrived. Like most of the businesses of the 20 Committee, the solid foundations created in the 1990s meant they could take advantage of the current boom brought about by high oil prices.

Kopytina has now branched out into acting, talk-show hosting and even modelling for conceptual artists, and she also employs husband No 2. "Yes, I decide on his pay," she says with a smile.

Perhaps surprisingly, these women say stable marriage and children are the key to long-term success. "It gives you a platform," says Belova.

Irina Eldarkhanova, owner and founder of Moscow's first luxury chocolate company, Confael, married young and moved with her husband to his native Chechnya to set up a clothing business. The marriage blossomed and so did the business, and luck also played a part - they decided to transfer back to Moscow a month before war broke out in Chechnya.

Her next break was seeing a fresh opportunity and grabbing it. The clothing business was going well, but she saw a gap in the market for a luxury chocolate maker.

The result is a chain of cafes where everything comes with chocolate, and where sculptors are on hand to produce anything out of chocolate, from chess boards to lifesize statues of Venus in white chocolate.

Early on she got valuable publicity when the president's wife, Lyudmila Putin, was presented with a giant chocolate horse, and now Russia's newly rich queue up to order Confael creations.

"Women are better at this sort of thing, they pay attention to relations with colleagues, they are able to delegate better," she says. To illustrate her point, she tells me of a four-metre chocolate alligator recently shipped to a tycoon's party in Siberia. It was too big for his guests to finish, and the tycoon decided to send it back to his headquarters in Moscow. He called to ask if the sculptors could repair it - recasting the bits that had been eaten. The answer was yes - anything to keep the customer happy.

And this flexibility of thought is not confined to carrying out repairs on chocolate alligators.

"The first thing I tell young women getting into this business is don't make excuses," says Yelena Yatsura, Russia's leading film producer. "The first rule is that nobody is responsible for your situation but you. You are the author of your mistakes and of your successes. And that's it." Like the other committee members, she did things the hard way, learning about film work when she was an exchange student in Dublin in the early 1990s. She returned home to find Russia's film industry on its knees.

The industry had produced some great directors, but it was feather-bedded with committees, not movie-goers, paying the salaries and ordering cinemas to screen approved films. Yatsura became a film producer in a country where the profession was simply unknown, struggling to juggle production deadlines, repay investment and find cinemas to take her movies.

A few years ago she came across a script for a film about Russian soldiers in the 1979-1989 Afghan war. She battled for funding, found distributors, worried about production deadlines.

The movie, The Ninth Company, became last year's blockbuster, resonating with audiences as Apocalypse Now and The Deerhunter once did with Americans.

Yet these success stories cannot mask the grim reality of life for many Russian women. Amnesty International says one in four married women are the subject of domestic violence, and, astonishingly, that every 40 minutes a woman is battered to death by her husband.

Wage rates for women lag far behind those for men, despite promises in the constitution about equal rights and equal pay. And if you say the term "businesswoman" in a Moscow bar and most men will assume you mean "prostitute".

These difficulties may account for a certain ruggedness among members of the 20 Committee.

They see themselves as pioneers, trying to build Russia into a business superpower, breaking its reliance on oil and gas, and their lessons are as applicable to men as much as women.

"Feminism is something that is intellectual, artificial," says Yatsura. "From the social point of view [ Western] European and American women are more independent than we are, but inside they face the same questions. Happiness and satisfaction cannot be achieved only through new social laws."

See www.kom20.ru