
order of hire, later becoming their badge numbers. Ken was #1 Harlan was #2. The first two women hired were
Women were not rare at Digital. From perusing a list of the
first 100 full-time employees, 36 were women. Years later, the main reasons
Olsen gave for locating in Maynard were low rent and a local work force with lots
of factory experience. Many of the women were walk-to-work Maynardites, some
who had worked in the same buildings in the woolen mill era, which had ended
less than 10 years back. The newly refurbished work areas were clean, quiet and
well lit, although hot during the summers, as air conditioning was not installed
until around 1970. Throughout the buildings, summer weather meant lanolin from
the old wool-processing days dripping down the walls or from the ceilings above.
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Women at DEC, assembling boards (date unknown). This is probably the original space in Building 12. |
Alma E. Pontz was the first woman hired. According to her
2013 obituary she had already put in 24 years in the wool business before being
hired by Olsen as the first administrative assistant She was more than a decade
older than her bosses. She stayed with DEC until she retired 21 years later.
Gloria Porrazzo was the first woman hired to work in
assembling Laboratory Modules and Systems Modules. These products allowed Digital
to be profitable from its first year onward. According to Peter Koch, plant
manager, Porrazzo stayed with the company for 25 years, rising to the level of
production manager. The 50 to 60 women who worked for her in Assembly were
informally known as "Gloria's Girls." They were responsible for
inserting electronic components into circuit boards, welds and quality control.
Ken Olsen was known to drop in for coffee and a chat with Gloria to keep abreast
of any production problems.
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"Light, clean work in our Production Department for girls and women with good eyesight and nimble fingers." |
Why women on the production floor? Because it was no longer
legal to hire children. Back in the woolen mill years, children were hired for
the manual dexterity. In time, women had taken over those jobs. A DEC job
openings advertisement from 1959 specified a preference for women with good
eyesight and nimble fingers. Some women worked the “Mother Shift,” meaning their
day ended in time for them to be home when their kids got out of school.
Digital was not averse to hiring women with technical
expertise, but some of the customers had a hard time adapting. Olsen had gone
to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus to interview students
in the electrical engineering department in 1960. One result was the hiring of Barbara
Stephenson in 1961. From Barbara: "I was the first woman engineer at DEC. Customers
would call for an applications engineer. They would say 'I want to speak with
an engineer,' and I would reply 'I'm an engineer,' and they would say, 'No, I
want to speak with a real engineer.' I developed this patter: 'Well, tell me
about the application you have in mind. We have three lines of modules ranging
from five to ten megacycles and …' The line would go dead for a moment and then
I’d hear, 'Hey Joe, guess what, I’ve got a…woman…engineer on the phone!'"
Women were promoted from within. Rose Ann Giordano was hired
from Xerox in 1979 to work in marketing, promoted to manager in 1981, then promoted
in 1984 to become the first woman vice president and corporate officer at
Digital Equipment Corporation. Earlier, Maynard resident Angela Cossette was
hired as an administrative assistant in 1963 in support for DEC User's Society.
DECUS provided a pre-internet forum for computer users to exchange technical
information and user-developed software. Cossette moved up to becoming the company's
first woman manager, in time with as many as 100 people reporting to her. In
her own words "...Digital became very aggressive about giving women the
opportunity to grow in their careers and making it possible for them to move
into key positions." [Quote from company newsletter Digital This Week.] Cossette retired in 1992.
Cossette’s comment reflected Digital's self-realization that
it had a problem with its history of male-dominated culture. A Core Groups
program was started in 1977, evolving into the Valuing Differences philosophy
in 1984. The stated goal was for the company and its employees to pay attention
to differences of individuals and groups, to be comfortable with those differences,
and to utilize those differences as assets to the company's productivity.
Mark went to MIT (where Ken Olsen got his undergraduate when
the undergraduate population was 7 percent female. It is now 45 percent. Faculty is 25 percent women.
My wife Barbara worked at MIT for eight years, six of them for Paul Gray. By the time she left to finish earning her first bachelor's degree at UMass Boston, he was the #2 man there. She had come to know his family very well. A little later when he became MIT's President, she was hired to work part time as his wife's social secretary. At one of the services celebrating him after his death, his son related that he'd once asked his father what he thought the best thing at MIT was. The answer: "Abolishing the women's dorm" (which was across the river in Boston). The number of women admitted to MIT had been limited by that one dorm's capacity. After that it soared. Paul Gray was a great man.
ReplyDeleteCorrection to my earlier post: Paul Gray's son had asked his father what he thought the best thing he'd done at MIT had been.
ReplyDelete