What's on your Monday menu, RNYers

Have you considered writing about your life? Being in tech, I am always interested in your stories as a woman leader in the earlier days. I always tell new women leaders that one of the signs of change I see is that when I started in the 90s there was never a line for the ladies room at conferences and I look forward to the time it looks like a concert line, lol.

I do have a lot of short stories that I plan to put into a book someday. I would have to be in the mode where you get obsessed with writing and it is actually easy to stick with it.

I was born in 1948 and grew up with what we called DP's or displaced persons. They had come from countries like Poland and released from concentration camps after WWII. The stories they told me burn in my mind sometimes and I feel like it is important that some of their stories be heard, although they are mostly dead now.

One lady, Frankie, told me that when she was 15, her mother was suffering from a mental illness. The Nazi's came to the door and dragged her mother out to the street and shot and killed her. The nuns took Frankie to the convent and gave her a place to live and she cooked and cleaned for them. At night the young priests would come to her room and rape her.

To deal with the pain, she found it was easy to go to the wine cellar and drin****il she was numb. She had a husband and three kids, kept a spotless home, and cooked wonderful food, but she would go on drinking binges. Her story would probably make a best seller.

In 1966, I was fresh out of high school and hired for a clerical job at a factory. They had just gotten a computer and one of my jobs was to type in the tapes for the program. The tapes were made of paper and the program was completely in numbers. I only used the top row of the keyboard. When you pressed a number key it punched a hole in the paper tape. Each number had eight individual numbers and I got so fast that the machine would jam up.

I was curious about how the program was written and the programmer showed me how to read the blueprints and then put those measurements into a program. When the programmer left for another opportunity, I was given his job. They told me that they were delighted to be getting the work done for a women's wages. I made exactly half of what a man was making there. I also put up with a lot of sexual harassment working with all men. Back then it was just part of working.

The computer company had some new improvements and the programmers needed to go to classes to be taught how to make those changes. The company had some meetings and informed me that they decided it was better to hire a man for the job. Because they did not want to invest the time and money into training a woman who would just get married and leave. They hired a man with no experience at all and I trained him in the basics before he went for the advanced training.

I did get married, but I made up my mind I was also going to go to college and learn about computers. I worked full time, had a baby, took care of the house, and went to a community college at night to learn computer technology.

When I went to my first computer course, the instructor asked me if I was in the right room. He said, this is Fortran 101, not a secretarial course. There were 120 students and 4 of us were women. Only 24 of use finished the course and I was the only female who did not drop out or flunk out.

I graduated magna com laude and went to work for EDS. Being a woman was still rare, but I was treated very differently because I had that piece of paper from college. By the 1990's there were many women going to work in technical jobs. Most of them had no idea what the first women in the industry went through. You are right about there never being a line for the ladies room at conferences.

That would be a fascinating read!