The Disappearing Act

When I graduated from college in 1970 with a B.A. in history, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew that I didn’t want to — and didn’t have to — follow the typical paths of being a teacher, nurse, secretary or housewife. But which path to follow?

I decided to look for a job in the computer field for two reasons: Although there were no computer classes offered at my university (typical at the time), after graduation, I found and enjoyed a one-week Intro to Cobol class (Cobol is a programming language). My second reason, which may sound strange to readers today: the computer field was wide open to women. It was so new that, unlike in law or medicine, for example, there were no gender barriers to break down. I wanted to pave my path through the undeveloped landscape of computers, rather than walk into the crowded and male-dominated fields of business, engineering or science.

But then, instead of riding in with a wave of women in a new, developing field, I saw firsthand the exodus of women from my industry — but for different reasons than have been documented by other accounts. My experience serves as a reminder that sometimes even a small policy change can have a huge impact on an industry.

In 1971, AT&T Long Lines hired me as a programmer. My first assignment was to attend a three month training class, where they taught COBOL, JCL (Job Control Language) and “our” way of doing things, the AT&T Data System Processes (DSPs). Only one student had a computer-related degree, and over half of my classmates were women. When we “graduated” and moved into the larger pool of about 80 programmers, about half were women.

I enjoyed my programming job and the variety of the work I was expected to do. Part of the job was strictly programming, but we were also responsible for the entire lifecycle of the computer business systems– from understanding the business flow and user requirements to designing new systems; from managing data to managing people and projects; from training users to handling system operations, maintenance and improvements. Technical, business and management skills were all required.

By the mid-1970s I had moved from programming to being a project manager, responsible for multiple systems, with programmers working for me. I began to notice that the new hires were predominantly young men. It was easy to see why — AT&T implemented a new hiring policy requiring that new applicants have college degrees in information technology (IT) or computer science. I knew I would not have pursued an engineering-oriented computer degree myself, so I wasn’t surprised other young women weren’t interested. As a freshman in college, I had considered majoring in math or biology, but realized the curriculum required would narrow my focus at the very time I was being given the opportunity to expand it exponentially. The IT or computer science degrees, when developed in the mid-1970s, had the same problem.

It was also clear to me as a manager that not only was such a degree not necessary for most of the work we did, it was often an impediment. For example, the skills taught for such degrees, and, oftentimes, the interests and aptitudes of those pursuing those degrees, were sometimes incompatible with what the company actually needed to get done. Students interested in machine-level languages, algorithm design, and virtual memory were not interested in, trained in, or adept at understanding business flows, interacting with computer-illiterate end-users or using ‘’simple” languages like Cobol. Managing projects and people was not their desired career goal.

I, as a line-manager, was not involved in the corporate-wide decision to require computer degrees for new programmers. I can only speculate that part of the rationale was that hiring “relevant” degrees was expected to lower training costs — like the cost in 1971 of my initial three months of training. Five years after that decision, though, we were still putting new programmers through three months of training. They still needed to learn the languages we were using and the AT&T DSPs.

It is only in hindsight that I appreciate another change that was happening around me in the mid-70s. In 1971, I transferred to Long Lines’ Washington D.C. data center, which had only twenty programmers. We had our own, in today’s term, entrepreneurial culture. The managers for whom I worked came up through the computing ranks. We all pitched in according to our skills and interests. We were somewhat independent from the culture of the larger company. However, as we grew in size and budget, we got more and more absorbed into AT&T’s management structures. We became more hierarchical, less flexible, more competitive. Corporate managers who did not understand the variety of technical, business and management skills required saw our work as engineering-type jobs. The decision to require IT or CS degrees fits into this perspective.

By the time the 70s ended, the leaky pipeline — now a STEM cliché — had become an undeniable fixture of my work environment. The women with whom I had started working in the early 70s were now leaving in droves, in large part because they wanted to start families — and there was little to no policy and cultural support for working women with families. Good child care was very scarce and expensive. Our now-competitive culture normalized lengthy work days, and stigmatized taking time off for family needs. It was hard to find balance with one child and impossible with two. And while many of my women friends were ‘feminists,” that identity still struggled to overpower the overwhelming cultural expectation many of them felt to stay at home with their children.

I remember looking around my workplace on my 30th birthday — the end of 1979 — and gasping. I had told myself that I was a pioneer for women in computing — helping lead the way. It was a nice story. But as I looked around in 1979, I saw, to my complete dismay, that there were no women following.