The Internal Memo That Allowed IBM's Female Employees to Get Married

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-internal-memo-that-allowed-ibms-female-employees-to-get-married/272832/

by JumpCrisscross • 13 years ago

160 87 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

Ianvdl• 13 years ago

I find articles like this absolutely fascinating. And to think this was only ~60 years ago.

sp3323• 13 years ago

"they wanted to hire people who had fought in the war, who were then coming back from World War II and wanted jobs. I think you could understand that, and people did understand that at the time."

So, it was really affirmative action (for veterans)!

mapgrep• 13 years ago

Affirmative action is not when you fire someone to make way for a privileged class.

We _have_ affirmative action because of these more extreme forms of discrimination.

sp3323• 13 years ago

Soldiers and veterans are not privileged. That's why we got the G.I. bill for example.

Edit: it seems like you also mean that firing someone cannot be affirmative action. I disagree.

ars• 13 years ago

> Affirmative action is not when you fire someone to make way for a privileged class.

What's the difference? In one case the less-privileged person had a job for a while and made some money, in the other case they never got a job in the first place.

ucee0544• 13 years ago

"these more extreme forms of discrimination"

Oh kiss my ass.

In those days the men worked, and the women stayed home to take care of the children.

It's not like the returning soldiers could marry employed women and then be house-husbands.

And you know it.

wglb• 13 years ago

My mother tells of that time. Women, who had been an industrial force during the war, were admonished that their place was in the home, and they need to get out of the work force and marry returning veterans.

ced• 13 years ago

This reminds me of a comment from Richard Hamming, who worked at Bell Labs following the war:

Q: But what I sense among the young people these days is a real concern over the risk taking in a highly competitive environment. Do you have any words of wisdom on this?

A: Ed David was concerned about the general loss of nerve in our society. It does seem to me that we've gone through various periods. Coming out of the war, coming out of Los Alamos where we built the bomb, coming out of building the radars and so on, there came into the mathematics department, and the research area, a group of people with a lot of guts. They've just seen things done; they've just won a war which was fantastic. We had reasons for having courage and therefore we did a great deal. I can't arrange that situation to do it again. I cannot blame the present generation for not having it, but I agree with what you say; I just cannot attach blame to it. It doesn't seem to me they have the desire for greatness; they lack the courage to do it. But we had, because we were in a favorable circumstance to have it; we just came through a tremendously successful war. In the war we were looking very, very bad for a long while; it was a very desperate struggle as you well know. And our success, I think, gave us courage and self confidence; that's why you see, beginning in the late forties through the fifties, a tremendous productivity at the labs which was stimulated from the earlier times. Because many of us were earlier forced to learn other things - we were forced to learn the things we didn't want to learn, we were forced to have an open door - and then we could exploit those things we learned. It is true, and I can't do anything about it; I cannot blame the present generation either. It's just a fact.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html - the best essay on doing great work that I know of.

IvarTJ• 13 years ago

It's awesome to hear that an 86 year old woman is still programming!

pavel_lishin• 13 years ago

> "When they were computing the orbits of outer planets on the SSEC [IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, which operated between 1948 and 1952] the machine took up an entire room, including the ceiling, under the floor and all the walls," she tells Bosker. "My husband has 13 symphonies on his iPod Mini and they only take up a third of the space. That boggles my mind. You don't even know what a miracle you're living in."

My first thought was, "Wow, 13 symphonies take up a third of an entire room?", and then I thought about it and realized it's probably time for more coffee.

russell2• 13 years ago

You obviously havent been to a live symphony performance. The only person that I know of who had the audacity to attempt such a thing was Charles Ives.

saalweachter• 13 years ago

Yeah, we're all spoiled children nowadays.

The envelope works out, though. iPod Minis were only 4-6 GB, so you're only talking 1300MB-2GB of space used. 100MB per symphony is reasonable for a 30+ minutes of high-bitrate music.

dangerf• 13 years ago

From the linked Huff Po article: "I was doing a lot of programming from home. I would write out the program on paper using Fortran [a programming language], then I would mail it in to key punch operators at NYU, they would punch the cards out and then I would use the cards to run the program."

Programming on paper from home, that's incredible.

russell2• 13 years ago

You youngsters dont realize what it was like to have one day turnaround. Yeah, one day to find a syntax error. Mailing in your coding sheets was only marginally slower than sticking them in your out basket and getting them back a day or two later. Even longer if you wanted them verified.

dchest• 13 years ago

Relevant http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07...

gwern• 13 years ago

Interesting. So why did they change? And the memo is specific that it's a temporary policy, so how did it become permanent or is it still on the IBM books as a 'temporary' policy of allowing women to marry?

ksmiley• 13 years ago

Wikipedia says[1], IBM experienced a growth spurt towards the end of the war. If they had any sort of hiring quota to reach, it would make sense to relax eligibility rules.

Additionally, the presidency of the company changed hands from Thomas Watson Sr to Thomas Watson Jr around that time, and he may have been more progressive. He drafted the "company's first equal opportunity policy letter" in 1953.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1946.E2.80.93196...

rmc9• 13 years ago

Any policy that distinguished between employees on the grounds of gender or marital status is illegal in many countries.

Almost certainly there are many newer policies in IBM which state now that marital status and gender aren't to be taken into account.

rmc9• 13 years ago

So why did they change?

More broadly: the feminist movement.

mutagen• 13 years ago

Which of our business practices company policies are going to be discriminatory, detrimental, outdated, and headline worthy in 60 years? I realize IBM's policy had its roots in a post war era but even the memo 'temporarily' rescinding the policy reads wrong.

Immigration policies? They're really a governmental issue that has become heavily politicized but they seem to me to be ripe for change.

Intellectual property? Will there be progress made or will we still be arguing about copyright length, patent trolls, and trademark infringement? IP issues don't seem to be in the same category of basic human equality, though at times they reach that point (drug medication?)

Universal healthcare? Work/Life balance?

pinko• 13 years ago

Parental leave, and childcare more generally. In a society with privatized child-rearing where increasingly both parents work, the childcare issues are just brutal. For parents and children.

hermannj3143• 13 years ago

I personally struggle with the idea of offering benefits based on your family status. I realize this is not a protected class and probably isn't because it is a very common form of discrimination. People with children generally receive preferential treatment and additional benefits than their single/child-free coworkers.

To me, the future should be free of workplaces offering parental leave and children benefits as it discriminates against those that 1) don't want children or 2) can't have them.

PeterisP• 13 years ago

This feels like something that (together with healthcare) should be decoupled from the employer as much as possible.

It may be reasonable to handle childcare and healthcare individually with privatised services. It may be reasonable to have them handled centrally for almost everyone by the government, as in Scandinavia.

But having to rely on your relations with employer for these issues is just begging to be abused, and often is - where the employees are sufficiently vulnerable, they get abused even more by this.

rmc9• 13 years ago

Probably any company that supports "traditional marriage", ie excludes same sex couples.

bvcqw2• 13 years ago

Profit sharing

nfg• 13 years ago

You think profit sharing will seem conceptually outrageous in the future? Or the opposite?

yesimahuman• 13 years ago

Discrimination based on employment status (for example, discriminating against people who aren't employed when applying for a new job). A few states have laws making it illegal already.

bcoates• 13 years ago

I suspect that CAPTCHA will be viewed as a symptom of a mindset of bigoted superstition, and treated with the same disdain as witch hunts and cargo cults.

CaveTech• 13 years ago

Comical statement, but CAPTCHA's were indeed created because of need (bots exist, and aren't make believe!).

_delirium2• 13 years ago

Mandatory urine testing seems vaguely creepy/invasive already, at least outside a narrow range of machine-operator type jobs. If you're working as a clerk or programmer or something, imo a company should limit itself to judging whether your work product meets its criteria. If it doesn't, they can lay you off, and it hardly matters whether the reason is that you're a pothead, just lazy, bad at your job, actively trying to screw with the company, or some other reason. Delving into your bodily fluids to try to determine if you're a good employee is weird.

intractable• 13 years ago

> Mandatory urine testing

I don't think these are the "IP issues" to which he was referring.

Daniel_Newby2• 13 years ago

Actually, drug testing is a good measure of impulsivity and distractibility. If a person cannot manage to pass a drug test, they lack self control and are likely to do things like bitch out customers and break expensive equipment.

The self control aspect of drug tests are probably a pretty good proxy for IQ—ADHD is correlated with a substantial 10 point drop in IQ.

You could just as well test for salt consumption as cocaine. The point is to check whether the applicant can hold their shit together for a few days for something as important as a job.

jaggederest• 13 years ago

In office workers vs remote workers - but I have a dog in that hunt.

columbo2• 13 years ago

> Which of our business practices company policies are going to be discriminatory, detrimental, outdated, and headline worthy in 60 years?

If the next 60 years are anything like the last 60 years then holy crap the changes will be huge.

* outdated Offices. There will still be buildings in 60 years but office parks and sprawl in general will be gone.

* detrimental 40+ hour work weeks, screens, sitting, just about any physical job today. I'd like to think with the increase of technology the number of actual hours people work will drop considerably

* discriminatory

- Requiring someone to physically appear or give any indication of race/gender/age during an interview. I could see this becoming the norm in 60 years where you interview people wearing suits like in a scanner darkly.

- General acceptance of the gradient between gay and straight.

* headline worthy

"US Presidential candidates Toshiko Abe, Jennifer Summers, Linda Powell Jr and Frank Lancaster to debate the digital constructs of Douglas Adams, Anthony Burgess, Jon Stewart and Mr Rogers. Moderated by George Carlin's head in jar." ... gotta have hope!

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

>>detrimental 40+ hour work weeks, screens, sitting, just about any physical job today. I'd like to think with the increase of technology the number of actual hours people work will drop considerably

This hasn't been the case in the past 60 years. What makes you think it will be the case in the next 60?

illuminate3• 13 years ago

"gotta have hope"

Ehhhhh, I wouldn't hope for "digital recreations" based on someone's subjective impression of a person :p

Some of the rest sounds nice, though!

rmc9• 13 years ago

As far as I know, some orchestras do this already. When interviewing a new person, the applicant plays behind a screen. Once they started doing that, they found they were hiring more women. (i.e. there was a previous subconscience bias against a women)

zeteo• 13 years ago

"the Company's normal policy of non-employment on the regular payroll of married women unless they are the support of the family"

That's a pretty twisted mindset. What in the world was IBM hoping to achieve by such policies? And how had they come into the business of supervising societal roles, instead of making money for their shareholders by hiring the most qualified people for the job?

SoftwareMaven• 13 years ago

There are 60 years of massive social change in the answer to that question. It's worth understanding where we were and where we've gotten to so we can continue to try to get further.

brazzy• 13 years ago

Back then it was the most normal thing in the world, and obviously true to any but the most unnaturally twisted minds that the proper role of a man was to earn a salary sufficient to support the whole family, and the proper role of a woman to be a housewife and mother.

Thus, a woman who worked while married was shirking her duties to her husband and children, and taking away some man's chance to build a family. And that man was probably a war veteran! Support the troops!!!

IBM's shareholder would probably have sold their shared in disgust and boycotted their products if they had openly undermined these norms.

hermannj3143• 13 years ago

Exactly. Let's dig up the hiring practices of the Bank of England from the 1700's and see how outraged we can all get.

simonh• 13 years ago

It was the "Don't be Evil" of it's time.

aetherson• 13 years ago

I don't understand why you added emphasis to "unless they are the support of the family."

Obviously the whole thing is pretty regressive and messed up by modern lights, but the emphasized passage is a mitigating factor, one that, I think, shows that while there was plenty of institutionalized prejudice, there was little actual malice.

IBM's policy was, "Naturally women should go home and be housewives if their husbands have jobs. But if their husbands don't have jobs, and the family depends on the wife's income, then the woman can keep her job." The first part is the risible bit, the second part much less so.

1123581321• 13 years ago

Your confusion comes from believing that making money is important and raising children, charity work and home management aren't important. If you believe they are equally important, then you will see that the conventions of the time were equally fair to men and women, or equally unfair if you like.

rmc9• 13 years ago

Well people thought women wouldn't be as good employees as men.

"Oh they'll get irrational and emotional! They won't be able to do high pressure things, and will break down and cry when the going gets tough. They will just fawn over a baby when they see one. They're also not very good at mathematics"

netcan2• 13 years ago

In a historical sense the real question is how did companies get out ofthe business of supervising societal roles. That's an old, old tradition and one we seem to be naturally drawn to. Authority is general, not specific. If someone tell you what to do at work they are an authority generally.

An officer disciplines his soldiers. He has authority over dress, behavior, language, hygiene. His role doesn't end with teaching them how to fight and giving them fighting orders. Teachers had similar authority. It did't end with school.

Landlords in the days when they were a class had similar authority. So did priests. etc. etc.

nn2• 13 years ago

From the original interview: "The only advantage you had over a newcomer was that you were prepared to read the manual." So true still today. I am always astonished by how much time some programmers are wasting by not reading manuals and how much of a competitive advantage even basic reading comprehension and willingness to do so is.

netcan2• 13 years ago

An interesting thing to me (a non-american looking in) is lines like: "non employment of married women unless they are the support of their family" & "* it was the end of the war and they wanted to hire people who had fought in the war, who were then coming back from World War II and wanted jobs.*"

This is anachronistic in terms of gender roles and whatnot but if you set that aside you see that IBM (and presumably all big employers) saw themselves as having a paternal-like role. Something associated with social democrat policies in the West and a Confucianist mentality in the east. Either way it's probably related to hints or requests by the Nation's Leaders. It's not very "Free Market^," in its modern interpretation.

^Quotes because I don't think Adam Smith, for example, would have had a problem with it.

The Internal Memo That Allowed IBM's Female Employees to Get Married

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