Oral history interview with Mildred Gignac

Abstract

Mildred “Millie” Gignac grew up in Carver City, Minnesota, then moved with her family to St. Paul in 1933-34. After high school, she worked briefly for the government then joined Northwest Airlines and became supervisor of the payroll department. She married a Turkish man, moved briefly to Colorado, then overseas to Syria for several years. She returned to the Twin Cities and joined Remington Rand Univac and became secretary to the director of financial control in 1956. She ascended the corporate ladder and eventually became Univac’s first female director (in 1980) with responsibility for benefits and administration. She discusses the several Univac locations where she worked, starting with the original ERA plant and the newer one on Shepard Road, both in St. Paul. After a tour of duty in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, working on information systems for employee records, she returned in 1974 to Univac’s Defense Systems division and the Eagan facility, where she continued executive positions in benefits and administration until her retirement in 1986. She offers comments on a set of Datamation advertisements from 1967.

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