I had the chance to speak with Laura Noll and Jane Protzman, both of the Wheaton College Class of 1959, when they returned to campus in May 2004 for their 45th class reunion. In 1959, they both graduated with Mathematics degrees and were immediately recruited by Bell Labs. Noll is still employed by AT&T; Protzman retired from AT&T in 1989. The recollections they shared with me painted a fascinating picture of the experiences of women of their era.

I was originally surprised to hear that they had been actively recruited as programmers right out of college. This was not unusual, they assured me. Bell Labs was purposefully recruiting women with mathematics degrees at this time. The women they hired were given the title of Senior Technical Aide, and were essentially entry-level programmers. They were recruiting men, too, of course; however, all of the men they hired out of college were sent first to a year of graduate school, and then started work as a Member of Technical Staff. Noll remarked, "When they interviewed us and hired us, they didn't necessarily say, 'We're interviewing you and hiring you for this level of job, and if you were a guy you'd be interviewed and hired for this other level of job.' That wasn't discussed." Nonetheless, that was the situation at the time and for many years after that. There were occasionally a few men in the Senior Technical Aide position, but unlike the women (who all had mathematics degrees), they were typically men who had received some training in the military and did not hold any degrees. Shockingly, one woman in Noll's group had a Ph.D., and yet still did not hold an advanced position. When she went out on maternity leave, she insisted that a condition of her return would be that she would be granted a Member of Technical Staff title like the men. The need to fight that strongly for advancement sometimes intimidated Noll; "She was a very strong person," she recalls. "I remember from time to time having conflicting thoughts of: Did I want to do what she did to get ahead, or not? Because it wasn't necessarily my personality."

WHY COMPUTER SCIENCE? Noll: "I think it sounded interesting, and challenging, and the people I talked to were all very interesting, and very smart, very knowledgeable in different areas." Protzman: "I was an only child. My father was of the belief - he was way ahead of his time - that young children should learn how to do everything...he made me fish, he made me go to ballgames...I never had any feeling that women could do less...coming from Wheaton, and all of the women in my family had degrees, it was never a question...I didn't even know I was being different." Noll: "I think what has been fun is that you have to keep current, so you're always learning things; it's not like you learn something and you can apply it - you have to keep learning, and there's always new challenges."

When I asked both women about the relationships they had with their male peers when they were first starting out, I revealed my temporal bias. I was thinking of the contemporary complaints of women who feel that their male counterparts have more extensive experience, or at least act that way. However, in this situation there were few or no male peers, since the men and women were hired into entirely different positions. A class action suit in the 1960s finally brought equality to the company, and women were then offered a chance to attend the graduate school program and achieve the positions previously only offered to men.

The different situations of men and women were not the only major contrast between their experiences and those of their contemporary counterparts. While women in Computer Science courses today learn about writing functions in their first semester as a primary part of program design, Protzman recalled how Fortran originally did not have any such constructs, which complicated their work on a large-scale program. "We didn't have subroutines, and it wouldn't compile; the computer wasn't big enough! And then one day the boss came in and said, 'We have Fortran 2, with subroutines!'" With that revolutionary change in the language, the programmers were able to restructure the entire program they were working on. Another aspect of the past that Protzman remembers with amusement is how programs were run. Whereas today's Computer Scientist may complain about how long something takes to compile, it is not comparable to when Protzman would have to take a box of punch cards, drive it 20 minutes to where it could be fed into the computer, sit in a lounge waiting for the program to run, and then drive 20 minutes back to the office. With that kind of time invested in a single run, "you didn't make mistakes - or you tried not to," she said.

VIDEO CLIPS TO VIEW The difference between how men and women were recuited. (11.5 Mb) Did she want to make the same choices? (3.06 Mb) You have to keep learning. (1.24 Mb) Problems at the mixer. (1.9 Mb)

As we were concluding our chat, both women agreed with the speculation that in some ways it may have actually been easier for them to enter the field of Computer Science than for the young women of today. They were recruited with no prior computer experience, as were their male colleagues; today, computer experience starts at a very early age, when it is unfortunately considered "uncool" to be into computers. Noll also pointed out that the advantage of going to what was (at the time) a women's college was that she could take Math and Science courses without being intimidated by men in the class, a common complaint that continues to this day in some fields, particularly Computer Science. However, it is possible that the intimidation could sometimes run the other way. Protzman recalled, "We'd go to a mixer, and this nice young man, you'd dance with him, and he'd say, 'What's your major?' (I mean, we all tell these stories) and you'd say, 'Math,' and they'd walk away."

Speaking of young women who back away from involvement with computers because they are afraid of peer judgment, Protzman said, "They don't have their identities; our identities were established when we started." The solution? Both women urge their younger counterparts to have the confidence in themselves to pursue what they are interested in, regardless of what others may think or say; excellent and timeless advice from those who have walked the path to those still considering it.