Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: August 04, 2018 12:55AM
When I was working at Litton Industries (in the last couple of years of my teens), I assembled circuit boards which went into inertial guidance systems. After we (all females) assembled these boards, the completed boards went to "technicians" (all males) who tested them to make sure that our solder joints were properly soldered, that the resistors, capacitors, and transistors were all in their proper places, were facing in the correct directions, and linked in the proper ways to the circuitry, and that the boards would "do" what they were supposed to do when they were installed in the inertial guidance systems they were intended for. I got to know several of the technicians, began asking questions about THEIR jobs, and I learned that what they were doing, while advanced from what I was doing, was also not THAT "advanced." It all seemed pretty straightforward to me.
I went to my foreman and said I wanted to be a technician, to which the answer was: it was not a job for "girls." At Litton, only males could be technicians.
I lobbied, and finally--after a LONG time, and with great reluctance--I was told that they would give me the text used in technician school (it was a company school, just as the assembler course I had taken had been), and if I could pass the final exam with a passing grade, I would be allowed to become Litton's first female ("girl") technician.
I studied the text (it wasn't any more difficult than what I had learned when I went to assembler school--just somewhat different), told them I was ready to take the final exam, was given the exam--and I passed with 100% on the written portion, and I forget my practical test score, but it was in the 90s...at which point I was told that, although they could not figure out how I had done it, I obviously must have cheated on the test(s), because NO "girl" could have learned to be a technician from studying the technician course text.
The male executive who made the final decision (despite my test scores, the decision involved how NOT to promote me to technician) was Tom Loy, the executive in charge--and a name I will remember until the moment I die.
A few years later, when I was working at Capitol Records as a purchasing clerk (and writing freelance articles for publication, basically helping out producers to promote their harder-to-promote, but somehow financially interesting, artists), I saw what I thought was an easy subject to sell to an editor, and asked one of the producers I worked most closely with (on my freelance articles) if there had ever been a female producer at Capitol, and was told that there would NEVER be a female producer at Capitol--not ever!! That prediction didn't turn out to be accurate (a couple of years later there was a husband-and-wife producing team who did quite well for themselves, and she got producing co-credit), but the answer I received was revealing. So far as this particular (quite successful: Beach Boys, etc.) producer was concerned, there would NEVER be a female producer of pop music at Capitol Records.
I have spent most of my late-adolescent and adult life looking for side entrances into whatever-it-was I wanted to accomplish, because the "front" door was ALWAYS closed to me because of my gender.
This was also largely true of the female students I went through school with--in my academic classes, 100% of which were markedly above average. Girls who wanted to go into science or medicine (let alone MATHEMATICS!) were ALWAYS counseled to become school teachers or nurses--regardless of which schools they went to, or what degrees they eventually earned. In reality, most of them eventually became teachers and real estate agents (growing up in the Valley, real estate at that time was omnipresent--something everyone breathed in from moment-to-moment). The point is: these were the "girls" who were getting very high-90s percentiles on the Iowa Tests, and who were in gifted classes for all academic subjects (after taking either the standard written ("mass"), or the individual one-on-one-with- a-credentialed-school psychologist, IQ tests).
I know things are different now, but not so long ago, what is true today is not the way it was, and just as female victims of rape should not be considered guilty of the "crime" of getting raped, neither should females who grew up in American society as it actually was when they were growing up be considered "guilty" of not becoming what they COULD have become (mathematicians/scientists/engineers/doctors) had they lived in a more egalitarian culture, because their gender made them ineligible for entrance as deemed by whoever were the male gate keepers who existed during that period in our national history.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2018 01:15AM by Tevai.