Browsing by Subject "AT&T -- Long Lines"
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Item Oral history interview with Dana Becker Dunn(Charles Babbage Institute, 2016-01-07) Dunn, Dana BeckerDana Becker Dunn graduated from a rural Illinois high school, then attended Southern Illinois University as a math major taking numerous computing courses and graduating in 1972. She joined Bells Labs as one of the last STA ‘courtship’ hires, completing a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science from Northwestern University. Her technical career began in operating systems programming, with a specialty in relational databases; then she was promoted into supervisory positions in the AT&T headquarters in New Jersey. As a Sloan Fellow she completed an executive MBA at MIT in 1984 then went to work for AT&T information systems division. Among her managerial responsibilities were connecting marketing and technical staffs; overseeing large operational groups in marketing and communications; and in 1994 separating Lucent Technologies from AT&T. She retired in 2001 as an officer of Avaya. She reflects on the transformation of women’s issues within AT&T, including a suggestion that with overt forms of discrimination largely banished, it may have ‘gone underground’ and be more difficult to locate. This material is based on work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award B2014-07 “Tripling Women’s Participation in Computing (1965-1985).”Item Oral history interview with Marda Higdon Jones(Charles Babbage Institute, 2016-01-06) Jones, Marda HigdonMarda Higdon Jones went to high school in Iowa City and attended Iowa State University, graduating in 1972 with a major in mathematics and minor in computer science, and accepting a job with Bell Labs in Naperville, IL. In 1976, after being promoted to MTS, she completed a master’s degree at Northwestern University (and, later, an executive MBA from Columbia University). She discuses the influence on her and her colleagues of the 1970s women’s movement and affirmative action programs at AT&T, including the Men and Women in the Work Environment and Urban Minorities workshops. In the 1970s she worked in software development, then after a one-year rotational assignment in New Jersey, she returned to Naperville in a managerial position and then moved to Holmdel, NJ, as department head in systems engineering then division manager for network architecture. In 1988 she was promoted to director at Bell Labs, and the interview relates several instances of managerial and personnel challenges. She joined Lucent Technologies, the Bell Labs spin-off, in 1996 and retired in 2000. She reflects on 1970s-era gendered images of ‘electrical engineer’ and ‘computer scientist’. This material is based on work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award B2014-07 “Tripling Women’s Participation in Computing (1965-1985).”