How Organizing By Black Scientists, Engineers and Union Members at Bell Laboratories Significantly Increased Minorities and Women in Science and Engineering

DRAFT 

 

The Obama Administration has identified robust research and development investments as a key to national economic recovery.[1] In the 2008 presidential campaign, then Senator Obama talked about paying for 100,000 additional scientists and engineers by the end of his first term.[2] Mustering a technically trained workforce is central to the nation’s economic prosperity and security in a global economy.[3] While policymakers and stakeholders agree that preparing more American students, especially under-represented minorities (African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans) and women for careers in science and engineering is critical, a plan has yet to emerge for making this happen.[4] Visionary policymakers, stakeholders and organizations need to develop effective strategies to significantly increase minority and women scientists and engineers, in American corporations, research labs, government agencies, and universities.   The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the upcoming 40^th anniversary of three successful AT&T’s Bell Labs programs --- the Cooperative Research Fellowship Program (CRFP), Summer Research Program for Minorities and Women (SRP) and Graduate Research Program for Women (GRPW) --- that significantly increased the number of women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering majors and careers over the last 40 years.  The Association of Black Laboratory  Employees’ (ABLE) “strategic capacity”– motivation, salient knowledge and deliberative processes that facilitated the development of effective strategies – turned short-term opportunities into long-term gains by creating these programs at Bell Labs and led to their continued support through major changes at Bell Labs.[5]  

 

Organizing by African-American Bell Labs employees led to the creation of CRFP and SRP, in 1972, and GRPW, in 1974.[6] These programs which provide graduate school tuition and books, summer internships and employment, stipends and travel, mentoring by a Bell Labs technologist and an academic advisor for women and underrepresented minorities, in science and engineering have been hugely successful.[7] More than 550 minority and women students have received awards with 76% completing Ph.Ds. in Physics, Chemistry, Math, Engineering, and Computer Science.[8] Similar funded programs were only 40% successful. Between 1972 and 1992 CRFP produced 22% of all minorities who earned Ph.Ds. in electrical engineering, in the United States.[9] Fellows have published extensively, their articles have appeared in over 140 scholarly publications, and been cited more than 5,700 times.[10] They are a new talent pool which greatly benefited Bell Labs, industry, academia and the broader community becoming corporate officers, entrepreneurs, professors in major universities, inventors, and mentors for other minorities and women, in science and engineering majors and careers. It is estimated that 30-40% began their professional careers at the Labs (AT&T and Lucent).[11] Approximately 30% are professors, deans, and administrators at 70 top universities throughout the United States. AT&T Bell Labs was recognized for these efforts and awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the Women in Engineering Programs and Advocates Network (WEPAN) Breakthrough Award in 1998; and the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award in 1999.

I had the opportunity to meet two of ABLE’s founders and a number of graduates of CRFP/SRP/GRPW at the 16^th Conference of African-American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS), an annual gathering of black science and engineering researchers, professors, students and businesspeople.[12] Many graduates and the founders rank their involvement in CRFP/SRP/GRPW among their top professional experiences. The number of organizations involved in similar efforts needs to be expanded, because the number of underrepresented minorities in science and engineering remains distressingly small, receiving only about a hundred doctorates, in these fields, every year.[13]  According, to Dr. William F. Brinkman, Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and former AT&T Bell Labs Vice President of Research celebrating the 30^th anniversary of CRFP, in 2002, the hope of Bell Lab’s management was that CRFP/GRPW/SPR would lead to other organizations creating additional programs to greatly increase the numbers of blacks and women in the sciences and engineering.[14]

 

Why were CRFP/SRP/GRPW created at AT&T Bell Labs; why were these programs able to maintain a high level of corporate support, despite major changes, in Bell Labs corporate structure; and why have others failed to follow? CRFP’s Godfathers- Linc Hawkins, James West, James Mitchell, Earl Shaw and Lloyd Shepherd

 

Founded in 1925 AT&T Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, became the world’s best industrial research and development facility. According to Business Week, “IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, RCA's Sarnoff Research Center, and especially Bell Labs, were once viewed as national treasures blazing a research path for the entire country.”[15] Funded by enormous profits from AT&T’s U.S. telecommunications monopoly, it developed a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, light emitting diode, the electrets microphone, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language.[16]  The average home has at least 25 products based on Bell technologies including telephones, TVs, computers, CD players, remote controls and VCRs. Bell Labs has received nearly 30,000 patents.[17] Fourteen Bell Labs scientists and engineers have won 7 Nobel prizes for work done there, including current U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, in 1997, who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. Bell Labs contributed greatly to the unprecedented growth of the American economy, in the period after World War II, and with American science and engineering became the best in the world and among the most respected institutions, in American society.[18]

Not everybody shared equally in the post-World War II prosperity.  Minorities and women seeking employment and career advancement were discriminated against even in elite science and engineering organizations.[19] On December 10, 1970, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed charges against AT&T and its twenty-four operating companies for discriminating on the basis of sex, race and national origin in their employment practices.[20]Although Bell Labs broke the “color line” five years before baseball, hiring its’ first African-American scientist, Dr. William Lincoln Hawkins, in 1942, it waited 20 years to hire the second. Drs. Hawkins, Earl Shaw, James Mitchell, James West, Lloyd Shepherd and other African-American Bell Lab employees at Murray Hill, in 1970 created the Association of Black Laboratory Employees (ABLE) to address their employment and advancement concerns.

ABLE’s founders were an extraordinary group of scientists and engineers. Two of them, Hawkins and West, are recipients of the National Technology Medal, the nation’s top honor for technical innovation and contributions; and are also members of the national Inventors Hall of Fame. Dr. Hawkins, a chemist held 18 patents from the United States and 129 from foreign countries. In the late 1940's, he co-invented anti-oxidizing agents that gave plastic, previously subject to rapid deterioration, a useful life span of 70 years. The new coatings enabled the expansion of telephone service around the world and generated billions in savings for the telecommunication industry. In 1975, he became the first black engineer to be inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. Bell Labs’ annual W. Lincoln Hawkins Mentoring Excellence Award is named in his honor. Dr. Shaw, a Physicist sometimes called "the Henry Ford of laser research," is best known as the co-inventor of the spin-flip tunable laser, a device that makes it easier for experimenters and technicians to perform intricate and complex procedures with lasers, which can be especially useful in biology and materials science. Dr. West, a Physicist who holds 47 U.S. patents and more than 100 outside the U.S co-invented the electret micro-phone in 1962, which is used in 90% of the two billion microphones produced annually in everyday items such as telephones, hearing aids, camcorders, and multimedia computers. Dr. Mitchell, a chemist and expert in using high-technology techniques for synthesis and analysis of materials became Vice-President, Materials Processing Research, one of the first African-Americans to advance up the research and development management ranks, is now the Dean of Howard University’s School of Engineering. Lloyd Shepherd was part of team that received a patent for a safer communication cable with enhanced flame retardancy and smoke suppression characteristics.

They were equally gifted in their leadership of ABLE. Their motivation, salient knowledge, and the deliberative processes they set up built ABLE’s “strategic capacity” to effectively response to environmental conditions, opportunities, and challenges.[21]  At ABLE’s inception, in 1970, the challenge/opportunity was capitalizing on the pressure management felt because AT&T was sued by the federal government for employment discrimination that year. This pressure increased, in 1972, when “the Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. It was the year that the F.B.I. admitted the first two women agents. It was also the year that the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 passed Congress. It was the year that Title 9 of the Education Amendments banned sex discrimination in schools. As a result of Title 9, the enrollment of women in athletic programs in professional schools began increasing dramatically.”[22] 

ABLE’s founders were very motivated and committed to increasing minority and woman scientists and engineers. Born in the south, personally familiar with racial discrimination and the power of collective action for overcoming racial and gender discrimination, each of the founders devoted countless hours to organizing, mentoring, strategizing, meeting and developing relationships with each other, colleagues and other stakeholders, inside and outside the Labs. Dr. Hawkins who was the first black chairman of the American Chemical Society's project to promote chemistry among minority students, and helped to expand the science programs of predominantly black colleges mentored Dr. West, who gratefully said,

 

“I started my career at Bell Labs for one reason. And that reason was because I could look around and find people who looked like me, who were during what I wanted to do when I grew up. And one of the main ones became my mentor and that was W. Lincoln Hawkins. But I also know that there were a number of other chemists who were minorities at Bell Labs at that time, people like Charles Miller, like Bill Schlichtler(not black) William Northover, and Ray Story, just to name a few.”[23]

 

Dr. Mitchell, who chaired the Lab’s Affirmative Action Committee, in addition to doing his own research, running his own lab, and helping to organize ABLE---in the keynote address at CAARMS and in his bio, talked about the “three-way commitment” scientists and engineers need --- “a dedication to one's work, a dedication to the community of science colleagues, and a dedication to one's family because that's the source of emotional support.”[24] ABLE’s founders travelled extensively to recruit minority and female scientists and engineers and students. Dr. Mirian M. Graddick-Weir, former AT&T Human Resources Executive Vice-President and a CRFP Fellow, tells a story about accidently sitting in on a meeting where Dr. West was making a presentation about CRFP, “One of the reasons I did apply was because of a gentleman some of you in the room know, Jim West, who is a physicist at Bell Labs. He did an absolutely outstanding job of describing what it would be like spending a summer doing research at Bell Labs. He painted such a compelling picture of how fun it would be and what the opportunities would be like to learn.”  Dr. Carl Spight, a former Bell Labs physicist who served as an academic advisor, champion, and mentor support for the program, for many, many years recalling the early days of CRFP remembered,

 “Sidney Millman, Executive Director of Research, Bell Laboratories and Joel Burton, Executive Director, Bell Laboratories were some of the early Bell Labs directors who were key in creating the program that we are now celebrating here after 25 years. There is another name that Mirian Gradick invoked earlier and that is Jim West. He is a member of the Technical staff at Bell Labs and a key person in helping to guide and define leadership for the program. He was a mentor-at-large of a kind and certainly is one of the spiritual giants of this program. So I invoke the name Jim West here.”

Highly motivated by a fusing of their personal moral values and a passion for their constituency, ABLE's founders commitment to each other created an organizational structure within which they enacted ways to interact with each other and with their environment.[25] One of ABLE’s first activities was to set up a meeting with top Laboratory management for the purpose of establishing open and frank communications. This meeting became the model for many dialogue committees that were formed latter, throughout various AT&T entities for similar purposes. During the dialogues management challenged ABLE to find more minority and women scientists Bell Labs could hire.  The leaders of ABLE developed support within the upper reaches of the corporate hierarchy by helping top management understand the reasons for ABLE and reducing problems with white co-workers who inevitably misunderstand the need of black employees to band together. As, Art Hawkins, who organized the Chicago-area ABLE chapter found later, “Some managers are afraid of ABLE...they don't understand it and think its black people getting ready to riot. But some do understand the need for a support group. The higher you go in management, the more they can appreciate ABLE."[26] One of ABLE’s most effective strategies and key aspects of CRFP/SRP/GRPW was engaging key Bell Lab figures like Nobel Prize winner Arno Penzias to work directly with the students ABLE recruited said Dr. Howard G. Adams, National Institute for Mentoring,

“Let me tell you a couple of things that I think are so very, very unique about [the CRFP] experience. Number one, when I come to the lab on the day those students come in Arno Penzias always comes in when he was there. He was always there. He wasn’t one of those highbrow folks; they didn’t even know who he was. He would come in with his little note pad and he would go around and talk to a student and say, “can I get you to do something for me” which was real fascinating. The student would look at him like I don’t want to do anything; I’m not going to volunteer for nothing. So he would say OK and he would go on to the next one. And then when finally they would go “oh my god I wish I had volunteered, you know I didn’t know that’s who he was”. And the folks he got to volunteer, that was a very different relationship. But it was just very fascinating watching him come in and welcoming people to the Labs and telling them what they could expect while they were here. The mentors and everybody else knew what was happening, that was just crucial to the whole thing. I think the last thing that it does was the rich environment that exposes students to things they might not have gotten before.

 

ABLE’s leaders also gained support from key managers like Drs. Millman, Burton, and Penzias by developing leverage. The productivity of scientists and engineers at Bell Labs was regularly evaluated and appraised.[27] ABLE persuaded top management to become champions for diversity and mentoring, as a way to get the most productive scientists and engineers, regardless of race, ethnicity and gender, working at the Labs. Support for diversity and mentoring was ratcheted-up further and became everybody’s interest when Dr. Penzias linked promotions, compensation, and management reviews (“How Great I Am” statements) to individual’s personal mentoring efforts. According to Dr. West:

“We get the impression today; this program is sort of like the “big bang” theory. It just happened and I’m sure that there were some pre-cursors to the “big bang theory,” but I do know there were some precursors to the CRFP, GRPW program. A few years before these programs were inaugurated, most of the minority employees at Bell Labs got together and this was across the board, I mean we had the scientists, but we also had the people who cleaned the bathrooms and so forth, who became a part of that organization. And the purpose of that organization, by the way its name was ABLE, the Association of Black Laboratory Employees, was to improve the state of being for everyone within the company. Among other things, we petitioned the Council at Bell Labs for a meeting and some of the people who were at that meeting or at least one other at that meeting is Dr. Jim Mitchell, who is here with us. And one other name I need to mention is Dr. Earl Shaw. When we petitioned the Council and said, “Look, we need some more diversity here,” and “What is really missing are minorities and women,” and we got a very shocking response. They said go out and find some, we’ll certainly hire them, we hired you so find them and we will do that. We were all naïve at that point and said okay so we packed our suitcases got on the road and went to look for people that looked like us. And you know the result of that. We couldn’t find any. And so the only other thing left to do was to begin to grow our own and, hence, the creation of the Corporate Research Fellowship Program, the Graduate Research Program for Women and the Summer Research Program for undergraduate students. I, just to give you a little of that background so that you will realize what the precursors were to the big bang of these programs and we still may be searching for the precursors to the real “big bang,” although Arno (Penzias), I think, understands how all that happened and by the way, he was one of the best directors of the program and I don’t mean to single people out, but when I was there, he was among the best, he instituted in the Affirmative Action part of our “How Great I Am” statement that you had to show something that dealt with Affirmative Action and I think that for the President of an organization to take such a bold move is certainly worth recognizing.”[28]

To build ABLE’s membership the challenge was getting people busy pursuing their own careers, to join yet another effort, in which the outcomes and benefits were uncertain. The founders faced a “collective action problem” in that many employees logically could be “free-riders” because they would enjoy the benefits of the founder’s efforts even if they did not join, contribute or cooperate in this effort.[29]  ABLE’s goals were public goods in which the benefits are available for all to consume regardless of who pays and who does not pay.  Public goods like “clean air” or “better workplace conditions for minorities and women at Bell Labs” are equally available to “free riders” and those who do the work of providing.  Collective action problems make the beginning of any organizing effort tough especially when the benefits of participation are unclear, the effort has not produced any results, membership is small, outcomes are uncertain and joining could even be detrimental. At International Business Machines (IBM) where I started my career, black employees were discouraged from organizing a group like ABLE, by management which made it known such activities would negatively impact career advancement. ABLE to grow beyond a tiny fraction of Bell Labs African-American employees needed to be creative.

 ABLE’s leaders overcame their “collective action” problem and quickly grew their constituency to 14 chapters, 5 in New Jersey, by providing selective incentives that were available for those joining the effort, such as career advice, help with job complaints and social functions.  They implemented an open, collaborative decision-making process that attracted blue-collar as well as white-collar employees.  They overcame differences, in the perspectives and priorities of white-collar and blue-collar African-American Bell Lab employees by considering and encouraging everybody’s input and participation in decisions. The blue-collar employees wanted to focus on their grievances because the labor unions they were members of were not doing a good job representing them. The white-collar employees wanted to focus on increasing the minorities and women studying science and math, to increase minority and women scientists and engineers, employed on the technical staff.  ABLE’s victories included getting Bell to provide career development throughout all job classifications, to begin recruiting more minority employees and to start the Bell Labs' Collective Effort Management Development Program to help minority technical employees move to supervisory positions.

Kent Amos, who set up an employee association, similar to ABLE at Xerox, notes, “Everybody's looking at the Japanese and quality circles and the like. But there is no better classic American example of how employee involvement can work in industry today than the black caucuses and employee groups in major companies."^[30]

 

The almost 40 years of support and resources Bell Labs has provided for CRFP/SRP/GRPW, was due to effective organizing by ABLE. This support continued through reorganizations of AT&T in 1984 (divestiture), 1996 (trivestiture), 2005 (acquired by SBC) and 2007 (acquisition of BellSouth and Cingular).[31] ABLE, based on its’ founders motivation, access to salient information, and deliberative processes developed creative strategies to interact with these and other environmental changes.  The results of these strategies were a significant improvement in the quality of work life for minorities and women at Bell Laboratories; increased corporate/community involvement, and a significant increase in the number of minority and women Ph.D. scientists and engineers.[32] Similar organizing and leadership, across more organizations is needed to replicate CRFP/SRP/GRPW’s successes and significantly increase minority and female scientists and engineers, as Bell Labs management had hoped. 

 

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[1]               American Association for the Advancement of Science with participation by the Association of American Universities, “Navigating a Complex Landscape to Foster Greater Faculty and Student Diversity in Higher Education” Pg.1, http://php.aaas.org/programs/centers/capacity/publications/complexlandscape/PDFs/LawDiversityBook.pdf

[2]               John Tierney, “What Shortage of Scientists and Engineers?” New York Times, October 17, 2008, http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/what-shortage-of-scientists-an...

[3]               Shirley Ann Jackson, “Envisioning a 21st century science and engineering workforce for the United States: tasks for university, industry, and government”, Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable, National Academies Press, 2003

[4]               Jeffrey Mervis, “NSF Misfires on Plan to Revamp Minority Programs”, Science 23 July 2010:

Vol. 329. no. 5990, p. 376, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/329/5990/376

[5]               Marshall Ganz, “Why David Sometimes Wins: Strategic Capacity in Social Movements”, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November, 2002, Pg. 4

[6]               Remarks of Susan Staffin-Metz, Executive Director, Lore-El Center for Women in Engineering and Science Stevens Institute of Technology, “Overview of AT&T / Lucent graduate fellowship programs” at Building a Network of Leaders in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Conference, October 28, 2002, Washington D.C, http://morse.uml.edu/Activities.d/bnl.d/open_remarks/susan_metz.html

[7]               Dr. Anthony M. Johnson, CRFP Fellow ’77 “Successful Minority PhD Producing Programs – Bell Laboratories and the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program at UMBC”, March Meeting of the American Physical Society, Pittsburgh, PA, March 16, 2009

[8]               Elaine P. Laws, Elizabeth Loia, and Michael Merritt, “The AT&T Labs Fellowship Program— 35 Years of Mentoring Women and Underrepresented Minorities—An Update”, (2007) http://www.research.att.com/export/sites/att_labs/techdocs/TD-6XZNR8.doc; Elaine P. Laws, “AT&T Labs and Lucent Bell Laboratories Ph.D. Fellowship Programs 1972-2002”, (2002)

[9]               Science, vol. 258 (13), pg. 1196, November 1992

[10] Google Scholar; http://code.google.com/p/citations-gadget/

[11] Laws

[12]             Conference for African-American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences(CAARMS) http://www.caarms.net/home.aspx

[13]             Robert Mallet, Deputy Secretary of Commerce, in the Clinton Administration,  presentation at “Mentoring For Success: Nurturing Minorities and Women for Engineering/Scientific Leadership” conference;  April 23, 1998 http://morse.uml.edu/Articles.d/mentoring_for_success.pdf

[14]             Brinkmann, William F., “Thirty Years of Progress in Affirmative Action and Diversity”, Presentation at the April, 2002 American Physical Society Meeting, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002APS..APR.E7003B

[15]             John Carey, “An Ivory Tower That Spins Pure Gold: As the R&D arm of Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs has a big hand in profits”, BUSINESSWEEK: APRIL 19, 1999, http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1999/b3625145.arc.htm; http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=Bell+Labs&guess_ambig=PDP-1+Victor+Vyssotsky+Dennis+Ritchie#headline_14

[16]             Geoff Brumfiel, “Bell Labs bottoms out: Institute pulls plug on basic research”, Published online 20 August 2008; Nature 454, 927 (2008), http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080820/full/454927a.html; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

[17]             Narain Gehani, “Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel”, Silicon Press, 2003, Pg. 19

[18]             Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media

                Scientific Achievements Less Prominent Than a Decade Ago”, July 9, 2009, http://people-press.org/report/528/

[19]             Manning, K. R.; “Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just”, Oxford University Press, (1983)

[20]             CWA Local 9408- History of CWA, Communications Workers of American http://www.cwalocal9408.org/history.html

[21]             Ganz, Pg. 7

[22]             Jose Meija, President Supply Chain Networks Lucent Technologies,   

[23]             James E. West,  http://morse.uml.edu/Activities.d/bnl.d/summary/west.html Founders Recognition

[24]             Spangenburg, Ray, and Kit Moser. "Mitchell, James Winfield." Science Online. Facts on File, Inc. Web. 14 Sept. 2010.

[25] Ganz, pg.17

[26]             Robert J. McNatt, “Pride and Prejudice: The Story of Black Employee Associations”, Black Enterprise, April 1984, Pg. 63-65

[27] Peter F. Drucker, “The Frontiers of Management: Where Tomorrow's Decisions Are Being Shaped Today”, Harvard Business Press, 2010, pg. 115

[28]             http://morse.uml.edu/Activities.d/bnl.d/summary/west.html

[29]             Mancur Olson, Jr, “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups”(1965)

[30]            Black Enterprise

[31] Laws

[32]             2007 Leaders of African Descent, http://www.ableinc.org/include/main.php?PageID=9

 

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