Meet your Neighbor: Sybil Stoudenmire
Sybil was gracious enough to take some time answering our questions about her upbringing, education, and career. Be sure to scroll down to read about her life in her own words - a pretty amazing journey!
Sybil’s best advice is a quote that she has shared with each of her children and grandchildren as they started their careers..
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan PRESS ON! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
(He is an old guy, so I slightly updated it to ‘people with talent” instead of “men with talent”. They didn’t know about girl power in the olden days, but in my experience, he was right about all the other things.)
Name: Sybil Paul Stoudenmire
Age: 81
Place of Birth: Montgomery, Alabama (My family lived on a farm in Bullock County, Alabama, but the closest hospital was in Montgomery, about 50 miles away.)
Family anecdotes (actually, experiences) that inspired my educational goals:
Someone once asked when I decided to go to college. The answer was that I didn’t decide…from the time I was old enough to know what college was, I knew it was my parents’ expectation and my goal to continue my education.
Neither of my parents finished high school, which wasn’t unusual in the times when they were children. But both my parents valued education and educated themselves. They took advantage of advice and classes that Auburn University offered for farmers and “homemakers” through their county extension agents. They read the newspaper every day, subscribed to magazines related to farming and homemaking, and listened to the news on the radio at night.
When I was 5 years old, before I started first grade, they bought me a set of World Book Encyclopedias. When daddy came home from his farm work every night, I would sit in his lap in his big easy chair, and he would read to me. We started at Volume A and read all the way through Z…and by then I knew how to read!
When I started first grade (no pre-school or kindergarten back then) they bought me a desk so I could do my homework. Not that first grade had homework, but they wanted me to have a place of my own to read and write. (I still have the desk in my home library.) My reward for good grades was books. The school-provided books had seen better days, so they bought me new ones…and donated them to the school at the end of the year. They also bought me any books I wanted to read on my own.
The closest town, Union Springs, had a Carnegie Library. Once I could read, when mother or daddy went to town on Saturdays to buy groceries or farm equipment parts, they dropped me off at the town library.
Mentors or role models in school:
My favorite teacher was Mrs. McCaslan, my English teacher from 10th through 12th grade. She was not only a true ‘southern lady’ but a wonderful teacher. She expected all her students to do our best and challenged us to do so. I still know how to write a proper paragraph or outline. I can quote a couple of lines of Chaucer in Old English and have read most of Shakespeare’s plays…along with about a zillion other books. I didn’t know at the time how useful some of those things (not including the Old English recitation) would be in later life. However, when an Executive of one of the companies where I worked once told me ‘You are the only tech guy who can write and explain things in English so that the rest of us can understand it, instead of that tech jargon you guys always use’. In Executive Speak that meant ‘We will give you the budget to buy all this expensive computer stuff you asked for’. Thanks, Mrs. McCaslan! (His statement was also notable for including me with ‘the guys’, since I was the only woman Director in the IT department.)
Another mentor, or more accurately a role model, was my maternal grandmother, who was born in 1888. She was the postmistress and rural route carrier in Titus, Alabama. She was also a midwife. My mother told me that the local doctor would stop by to pick her up in his buggy and off they would go, anytime night or day, to deliver a baby.
I spent 2 weeks with her every summer. She subscribed to Readers Digest Condensed Books, so I had 4 volumes, each containing 4 or 5 condensed novels, to catch up on when I arrived. There was a tree in her backyard with a large limb, close enough to climb to and large enough to sit on, parallel to the ground. That was my reading spot.
In retrospect, as a woman who grew up on a farm in Alabama in the late 1800’s, without any formal education beyond elementary school, ‘kept house’, gave birth to six children (two of whom died in infancy), raised her four other children, had a full-time job and a ‘side gig’ delivering babies, she was a remarkable woman! (She was also a wonderful cook, a skill which my mother inherited, but I unfortunately did not.)
How I found my first job:
My husband found a job in Pensacola, and we moved there after we finished college. When my children were 5 and 3 years old, respectively, I started reading newspaper want ads for a chemist and found an opening at a local company. I applied and got the job. (My salary was enough to hire a wonderful woman who was my full-time cook, housekeeper and babysitter.)
The best, most interesting, most boring parts of my early career:
The best part of my first job was learning how to work😁. Although I loved growing up on the farm, riding horses, driving trucks and tractors, and ‘helping’ daddy farm, I had never had a real job, not even as a grocery store clerk or other typical teenager job, so adapting to the routine and interacting with my co-workers was a whole new experience. Fortunately, the people I worked with were very patient with me.
About 2 months after I started, my boss, who had a PhD in Chemistry and preferred to think rather than supervise, announced to me that I was now the supervisor of the two lab technicians in our area, both of whom were men who had worked there for ten years! They took it gracefully, especially under the circumstances…It was the 1960’s. I’m sure they had never seen a woman chemist, especially not as their boss, but they helped me to understand the lab procedures I needed to know. (Back to the books…a chemistry education didn’t include any classes in management, so off to the library on weekends to learn about how to be a good manager.) I learned from the techs and let them know how much I appreciated their work. I even got them a raise!
The instruments we used in our work were expensive and repairing them when they failed required calling a company repairman, which was also expensive. (Back to school again! I took a night course at Pensacola Junior College in ‘AC/DC Circuits’ and learned enough to fix most of them.)
The most interesting part of the job was learning about the production processes that the company used and how our lab could better help in analyzing and improving them. My small analytical group worked with other chemists who were directly involved in monitoring and improving the production process, so I got to work with the other guys, learn from them, and determine how my group could be more helpful. (And they were all guys. Only 3 women worked in our building: the receptionist, the librarian, and me. About the librarian: there was no internet or computer terminals or online data bases: all our work was recorded in notebooks and stored in the library, along with all our reference books.) The guys were generous with their knowledge and their time, although I did shock them occasionally. When I asked for a tour of the production plant, which was a loud, dirty, smelly refinery that produced camphor and other hydrocarbon products, they were aghast! I was a woman! Women didn’t go in places like that! (But they took me anyway, and after that I was ‘one of the guys’ who they felt free to joke around with, or even treated me as their surrogate daughter, since many of them were old enough to be my father.)
The most boring part of the job was the preparation of analysis and results that we gathered from our processes and experiments, which was done by hand with a little help from hand-operated (not electronic) calculators. There had to be a better way!
The company accountants (unknowingly, and originally unwanted) came to my rescue.! The company decided it would get a computer to do payroll. There was no space to for it in the administrative building (computers were very large back then) so they decided to put it..and the entire accounting group…in our building. Our sacrosanct scientific building! Invaded by bean-counters! To make it even worse, they moved the chemical supplies that we used daily to the basement of our three-story building with no elevator.
Turns out, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. The young man that they hired to program the computer would wander over to my lab to look at all the instruments we used in our work, and I would go over to his computer room to see what he was doing and ask questions. It occurred to me that maybe we could use the computer to take over some of our tedious calculations.
So I went back to school...again.
The University of West Florida had a program in what was then called Computer Science, and some of the classes were taught in the evenings, so I enrolled. I attended evening classes, and sometimes I could make it to late afternoon classes. At work, I wrote a program to help with our lab calculations. Then another fortuitous (for me, anyway) thing happened. Our production workers went on strike. While the company was negotiating, management decided to continue production using executives, office workers, engineers, and chemists as production workers. But, of course, it was the 1960’s, so women couldn’t work in the plant or cross the picket lines because it wasn’t safe, but they would continue paying us our full wages.
I was out of a job..at full pay! I could now attend school full-time! I only had two classes left to get my degree before the strike was over, and my boss gave me time off to attend late afternoon classes if I came in to work early on those days. I graduated from UWF in 1970 (with a 4.0 GPA). My second foray into using my new computer knowledge came when one of the engineers in the plant asked if I could write a program for him which he could use to calculate ‘Theoretical Plates’ in a distillation process. I had no idea what theoretical plates were, but with his help in explaining them I wrote a program that calculated them. (He included the code in his doctoral thesis and gave me a bound copy of the thesis.)
I worked in the lab for a few more years, but I was more interested in working with computers.
So, I left and started my own company. In those days only large companies could afford their own computer, so they contacted their accounting work out to others, generally banks. I got permission from the company where I previously worked to rent their computer at night, since they only used it during regular business hours. Then I found some potential customers – an accounting group, a large construction company, a property management and home building company, and a pest control company. The first step was to understand their needs and write the programs. In those days there were no personal computers, no internet, and no off-the-shelf applications, such as Quickbooks or ADP for accounting and payroll. I quickly realized that I needed to understand more about accounting, so I took accounting classes at UWF. After I had written the programs to provide for my customers' needs, I started providing my services. I would go to their offices to pick up their records during the day, then at night I would keypunch the data on punched cards, load it into the computer, run my programs, collect all the output…accounting records, customer bills, or paychecks…and deliver it to customers the next morning.
As my customer base grew, I needed help, so I hired a keypunch operator, and later a young man who was a self-taught computer whiz to help with programming. The keypunch operator led me to my next customer, and to my future career. Her husband worked at The Pensacola News Journal. He told her that they were dissatisfied with the accounting system that had been written and installed by their corporate owners, the Gannett company. He arranged an interview for me with their accounting manager and she hired me to write them a better system. They were very happy with their new system and relayed that to Corporate. The corporate systems department sent someone down from headquarters in Rochester, New York to review my work. After all, they had never heard of this little 3-person company. How could I write a better system than their programmers— they owned 100 newspapers!
A couple of weeks after the corporate guy left, I got a call from the VP of Systems, who asked if I would come to Rochester and conduct a weeklong seminar on how to write and document systems for 20 of their IT managers at newspapers across the country. Yes, indeed I would, as soon as I could find a winter coat in Pensacola, since it was awfully cold in upstate New York in February. I was confident about teaching the seminar since I had been teaching programming classes at UWF as an adjunct professor…. but also, a little bit terrified. This was a Fortune 500 company. What could their IT people learn from me? Turns out they seemed to enjoy the seminar and I found out how much they liked it on the day I was to leave. I was asked to meet with the VP of Personnel, who said that my seminar group told the VP of systems that they needed to hire me for the corporate systems group. He offered me a job at a salary which was about three times what I earned from my little company, and I only had to work from 9 to 5…in the daytime…which sealed the deal. (By this time my marriage was on the rocks. My husband decided, after initially agreeing that I should take the job, that he didn’t want to move to Rochester, and we got divorced. My daughter was then at Florida State University and finished her education at the University of Florida Medical School. My son lived with me in Rochester to finish high school, then attended Florida State for his degree in Finance.)
I loved working at Gannett, partly because of the challenges of continuing to learn as I moved up through the ranks, eventually to Director of operations and technical support, where I had responsibility for not only Corporate, but for our USA Today installations across the United States. Since we had newspapers all over the US, I got to visit many of them with my team to review their operations and to install and train them on new systems. Whenever I was allowed to hire more staff, I always tried to recruit qualified women, some of whom I found working as IT managers at our local newspapers. Many of them climbed the ranks to Corporate Managers. (One of them was also the third crew mate on my sailboat.)
We had moved our corporate headquarters to the Washington, DC area when we launched USA Today, and I really didn’t like living there. (By the time I left I supervised a staff of about 200 people.) I moved back to Rochester, where I worked as Director of IT for Monroe County, where Rochester Is located, and later as Director of Administrative Computing for The University of Rochester.
In 1995, my son, who was an IT and Finance consultant with Arthur Andersen, at that time the largest Accounting and Consulting firm in the US, called to ask if I would be interested in interviewing with his boss for a job working with companies to help them prepare for the impending computer problems which would be caused by the year 2000. The job requirements, as his boss described them, were extensive IT Management experience, willingness to travel, and ‘enough gray hair to sit across from a Fortune 500 IT VP and convince him that we could help him solve his problems.’ Since I met all those requirements except the gray hair part, I interviewed and got the job with one condition I requested: pants suits only, no shoes with over 2-inch heels and no panty hose.😁
Over 5 years, I traveled all over the US, and to 27 countries on 4 continents. I could generally arrive on Friday evenings and spent the weekend as a tourist before reporting to work on Monday morning at our local office, then working with them at our clients’ offices. (I often thought to myself: ‘and they are paying me to do this?’). After we ‘saved the world from Disaster’, I worked with our young professionals, and our clients, teaching project management.
Then my son, who had left Andersen to work for a Resort in Orlando, called again. Would I be interested in a job as VP of their IT department? Yep! Off to Orlando...living the life with an Audi convertible and a swimming pool in the backyard….and being close to my son, his wonderful wife, and my two grandsons. After a few years there and later at another resort, it was time for retirement. I decided to move to Fairhope, not only because of my Alabama roots, but because my daughter and her husband had moved there after she finished her Pediatric residency in Houston. And, of course, because I would be there to watch my three grandchildren grow up.
I stored most of my furniture, rented an apartment, and spent about a year working with a builder on my new home, then settled in. My daughter worried about what I would do in Fairhope…maybe I could teach computing at the local junior college? I had to remind her what the word ‘retired’ means. 😁
My only job now is volunteering at the hospital and helping friends my age wrangle with their cell phones and laptops. Many women my age didn’t grow up with the advantage of a college degree, much less with laptop computers, video games, the internet, or on-line apps that do most everything. That doesn’t mean that they are dumb…just that they have had a different life experience. (And they have skills that most young people don’t…they can drive a stick-shift car, write a paper check, recite the multiplication tables, do arithmetic without a calculator, tie their shoelaces, sew, and cook meals from scratch...often without printed or on-line recipes.
Blatant examples of sexism I encountered and how I dealt with them:
The first one I encountered was when I interviewed for my first job. The Director of the lab offered me the job, then added, ‘the salary range is $580 to $620 a month (a really high salary in those days), then added ‘since you are a woman and don’t have to support your family, we will pay you $580’. I bit my tongue, took the job, exceeded his expectations, and got good raises every year. I read books, took college classes, and studied subjects not directly related to my initial job responsibilities to make myself more valuable, both to the company and to my future.
The next one occurred when I decided to trade the car my parents had given me when I was in college for a new one. I owned the car outright, it was registered in my name, and I had a salary that would allow me to easily make payments on the new one. The salesman reviewed all that information, then told me ‘OK, we have a deal…we just need your husband to come in to give his permission and sign the papers.’ This time I didn’t bite my tongue. I asked politely if I could borrow his desk phone and phonebook. I looked up the number of another car dealership, explained the facts to them, and asked if they would sell me a car in my own name without my husband’s ‘permission’ or signature. They said yes, and I told them I would be there in 30 minutes. I hung up the phone, picked up the keys to my old car, thanked the astonished salesman who had heard the entire conversation, and left.
Not particularly sexism directed at me, but at all married women those days, I couldn’t have a credit card in my name…it had to be issued to Mrs. followed by husband’s name.
After I finished my degree at West Florida, I applied for a job at IBM. Very few people had IT degrees in 1970, so computer companies often hired people with math degrees or science backgrounds and trained them in IT. I thought that since I had degrees in both Chemistry and IT, I had a good shot at the job…Nope! They explained that I was ‘an outstanding candidate’, but the job required some travel, and since I was married and had children, they couldn’t hire me.
I got my revenge much later. Gannett company was one of IBM’s largest clients. When I was director of operations, part of my job was reviewing and approving computer purchases for all our newspapers, and for corporate operations. I had an IBM salesman and an operations specialist who reported to my data center every day, to see what we needed in terms of new equipment, and to assist my staff with any problems. (If I had gotten the job I applied for at IBM all those years earlier, I might have been that IBM tech guy reporting to help my staff every day.)
After I started my little company and needed to hire some help, I went to several local banks to apply for a modest ($2,000) loan. Showed them my financials, explained that I needed a short-term loan to expand my business. Nope! I think they were pretty sure that a woman couldn’t (or shouldn’t) own and manage her own business. Luckily there was one bank who had a woman loan officer. She approved my loan, and we became good friends. She told me that she was really tired of training men who went on to become VPs, while her job and title never changed. (She got her revenge too. She became President of a bank that started up business in a little metal trailer and became very successful. And she still approved my loans when I needed them.)
I didn’t experience much sexism at Gannett. But never having worked in big corporate environment before, I was surprised when I found out that I had a secretary. When I first wandered out of my office and asked her where I could find a cup of coffee, she seemed a little taken aback. She explained to me that part of her job responsibilities was to get me coffee…just let her know when I wanted a fresh cup. I then explained to her that I thought fetching coffee for an able-bodied person shouldn’t be part of anybody’s job, and we would just delete that from her responsibilities. Just direct me to the coffee pot. We became good friends after that.
I encouraged her and all the secretaries I had during the years after, everywhere I worked, to take on more responsibilities, not including fetching coffee, and to continue their education. Many of them did and advanced to better paying jobs. I still get Christmas Cards from some of them.
Gannett was a very progressive company at that time. When the local newspapers sent their reports to corporate every month, they had to include what we would now call a DEI statement on their employees’ racial and sexual makeup, along with their job positions, which was considered along with the financial statements in their rating, which in turn was factored into department managers’ and publishers’ compensation. (Our newspaper in Honolulu had a problem with that part…they couldn’t find enough ‘white’ people to fill their quota.)
After several years, I was the ‘number 2 person’ in the Gannett corporate IT group. Then my boss got fired. I was scared that as his ‘right hand’, they would fire me too. In the interim while they looked for his replacement, I reported to the VP of Finance. I told him about my trepidations, and asked if it would better if I just started looking for a new job. His words to me, which I still remember exactly after all these years, were: ‘Gannett does not suffer fools. If you weren’t good, you wouldn’t be here. You’re not ready for the next step up yet, but you will be. Stay and learn.’ So I did.
When I worked for Arthur Andersen, there was no discernible sexism in the company. My boss, a partner in the company, who was Jewish once told me I was a ‘mensch’. When he explained what that meant, I realized that he couldn’t have given me a greater compliment. However, some our foreign affiliates, especially in Asia, were overtly sexist. I mostly just ignored it…. didn’t think I was up to changing the culture of an entire country by myself, and I didn’t have to live there. But in one instance in Tokyo, I couldn’t restrain myself.
My boss and I would take turns speaking during our initial presentations, which lasted all morning. Then we would divide the attendees into two smaller groups for the afternoon session. Everyone who was a global Partner in the company was required to read, write, and speak English. When the group who had been assigned to my session showed up after lunch, there was a young woman with them who they told me was a translator. So, could I pause frequently so she could translate what I was saying into Japanese. It’s very disconcerting to pause after a couple of sentences, wait for a translated version of what you just said, then continue with your train of thought, but I put up with it for a while. Then, after the young woman had translated a sentence or two, one of the Partners spoke to her (in Japanese) in a very harsh tone. I decided I had had enough, so I said (in English) that we would take a 20-minute break…they all seemed to understand that without translation.
Then I went to find the young woman. As I was walking through the cubicles, I heard someone crying. It was my translator. I asked what the Partner had said to her... ‘He said I did not translate one of your sentences correctly’. My temper got the best of me: if he doesn’t understand English and needs you to translate, how does he know you translated it wrong? I told her that shouldn’t come back to the session, and that I would speak to her Senior Partner to assure that there would no repercussions for her. Then I found my boss and the Tokyo Senior Partner and told them what had happened. They agreed with me. So, since my group’s break was over, I went back to our meeting room. “Gentlemen, since you are Partners in an Andersen affiliate, you are required to read, write, and speak English. If any of you cannot do that, please leave.” Then I asked the guy who made the young woman cry to translate that to Japanese because “I am sure that you understand what I just said, since you reprimanded the translator for her incorrect translation.” He did, with a hand in the cookie jar expression. [Pause...nobody left] ‘Now, we will continue in English. If you have a question, please raise your hand.’ I think I spoke faster for the next 2 hours than I have spoken in my life…and none of them raised their hand.
I also found out that some of our Asian affiliates also had to deal with racism, even in their own countries. I worked with our Manila affiliate for several months, training their staff on Y2K project management and helping them prepare plans and proposals for clients. A big client was the equivalent of the American Social Security Administration. I helped them prepare their proposal and rehearse their presentation. They did a great job on both. They scheduled their meeting with the ‘big bosses’ and were ready to go! Our Andersen partner in charge of the project then told me that she wanted me to do the presentation. But why, I asked. She would be in charge of the project and was well prepared to do the presentation. I was taken aback by her answer: ‘Because you are white.’ I did the presentation, but called on her to answer their questions, to emphasize her knowledge and leadership status. (They got the job and did it extremely well.)
My advice for young women entering the workforce in STEM fields:
Follow your dream. It may change from time to time, but don’t let yourself get bogged down in a job or a profession where you don’t enjoy going to work every day (or most days at least)
Don’t ever let anybody tell you can’t do something…prove them wrong by doing it. If you don’t know how at first, keep learning until you can.
Be considerate and helpful to the people you work with. Most of them will act to you in the same way.
Always stay curious and learn even about things you don’t need to know in your profession. It will widen your world. Are you an Engineer? A Computer Scientist? A Physicist? How much do you know about music or art or history or archeology or astronomy or sciences outside your field? You might be surprised how interesting those things are, and how your chosen profession might apply to them, either now or in the future. (When I was growing up, who knew that climate change would be a big deal…as in our civilization ending big deal? And what we could do about it?)
Read! About everything! By authors with real credentials in their field! I’m old, so I prefer real books, but I have asked for a Kindle for Christmas so I can catch up with you youngsters. And don’t rely on Google or TikTok or whatever the app of the week is for all your information…and especially not for advice from ‘influencers’. You are smarter than they are. My daughter is a Physician. Someone gave her a coffee mug that reads ‘My medical degree trumps your Google search’. And that’s true in any field...if you are a civil engineer, would you drive over a bridge built by someone who learned how to build bridges using advice and instructions on the internet, instead of what you learned to get your civil engineering degree? Of course not!