Oral history interview with Mary Holt

Abstract

Mary Holt graduated as a math major from Mount St. Joseph College, an all-women school in Cincinnati Ohio, then received a master’s in information science in 1970 from the University of Chicago. There many of her classmates were from Bell Labs; she herself took a position at Bell Labs Naperville IL facility. She describes her engagement with issues of inequality in the workplace and opportunity for women. She describes an important model in the Urban Minorities workshops, started by AT&T Bell Labs management to address racism, and her role in starting the influential Men and Women in the Work Environment workshops. She describes changes in Bell Labs’ company culture, through her departure in 1978 for Illinois Bell. She took a second master’s degree in Social and Organizational Psychology from the University of Chicago and returned to work in AT&T Corporation’s human relations, then took up an external career with ARC International, a training and consulting firm based in Colorado.

This material is based on work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award B2014-07 “Tripling Women’s Participation in Computing (1965-1985).”