Browsing by Subject "Dunn, Dana Becker"

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    Oral history interview with Fran Chessler
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2016-01-14) Chessler, Fran
    Fran Chessler attended the University of Michigan as a General Motors Scholar, majoring in mathematics and psychology and graduating in 1970. She went to work at Bell Labs Naperville, working on assembly-language programming to collect call data for 1ESS. She discusses the gender biases in the STA and MTS hiring grades. Promoted to MTS she did a master’s at Northwestern University. She discusses affirmative action and the distinct culture of Bell Labs Indian Hill/Naperville. In part owing to connections from the Men and Women in the Work Environment workshops, she moved to the computer center department doing systems programming on IBM computers. She describes an effective management style by her supervisor, Dana Dunn. She moved into a department chief position at Western Electric’s network system division, and compares affirmative action there to Bell Labs. In the mid-1980s she experienced unsettled times in AT&T computer systems, then returned to Bell Labs (all in Chicago) as a supervisor. In moving to the business side as senior product manager, she completed an executive MBA at Northwestern University; and retired from AT&T in 2001. This material is based on work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award B2014-07 “Tripling Women’s Participation in Computing (1965-1985).”
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    Oral history interview with Karen Coates
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2015-12-14) Coates, Karen
    Karen Coates grew up in rural northwest Washington state, then graduated from Mills College (Oakland CA) with a degree in mathematics. She describes lessons learned in running FORTRAN programs at nearby Cal State Hayward, a summer internship at IBM, and then work with UC Berkeley’s Laura Gould that led to computer-science teaching at Mills and at Stanford University. Continuing her computer science education at Northwestern University, she met many Bell Labs women working there on master’s degrees and applied herself for a job at Bell Labs. She began work at Bell Labs Naperville in 1974 as a Member of Technical Staff assigned to 4ESS then moved to the Computation Center and worked on the Bell Laboratories Network, an early packet-switched network. She describes working at Bell’s Murray Hill (NJ) facility with Bjarne Stroustrop, during the time he developed “C with Classes” which evolved into C++. Returning to Naperville/Indian Hills, she took up managerial positions in the networking project and then in switching-system applied research. She relates her experiences with the 1970s women’s movement and the supportive network of women colleagues. She left Bells Labs in 1985 and moved to California, where she worked for a subsidiary of TRW on military intelligence systems; a communications company called Octel; a startup venture; and a health-care enterprise celled Omnicell. She describes subtle transformations in gender discrimination in the 1980s and in Silicon Valley. This material is based on work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award B2014-07 “Tripling Women’s Participation in Computing (1965-1985).”