Oral history interview with Jan Raycraft

Abstract

Jan Raycraft grew up in northern Minnesota and graduated in 1980 from the University of Minnesota-Duluth with a double degree in biology and chemistry, gaining valuable experience in FORTRAN programming. (She later in 1987 received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School.) Direct from college she was recruited into an engineering division of the US Navy, serving as engineering duty officer (1981-2001) in Long Beach CA, Sturgeon Bay WI, and Annapolis MD in a variety of ship repair, ship inspection, managerial, and teaching roles. She vividly relates her experience supervising shipyard workers and the strategies she used to win their trust and confidence. Her experience teaching naval cadets in Annapolis affords her to offer comments on men and women naval midshipmen and gender-role expectations in a military setting. She moved from the Navy to Lockheed Martin in 2001 and worked there for 11 years as a program manager. In this setting, she describes elements of Lockheed Martin’s corporate culture, interactions with Navy customers and computer vendors, and her shifting activities as Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) computing became the norm.

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