Lucy Sanders

Cofounder and CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology and Bell Laboratories Fellow

• Born: April 4, 1954
• Birthplace: Indianapolis, Indiana

Primary Company/Organization: National Center for Women and Information Technology

Introduction

Lucy Sanders is cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, a consortium of more than three hundred corporations, universities, and nonprofits that work to increase the participation of girls and women in computing and information technology. Sanders also serves as executive in residence for the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a campuswide interdisciplinary initiative. She worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs), Lucent Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs for two decades and is a Bell Labs Fellow, the highest technical accomplishment bestowed by that prestigious organization. Sanders holds several patents in the area of communications technology.

Early Life

Born Lucinda McWilliams in Indianapolis, Indiana, on April 4, 1954, Sanders is the youngest of the three daughters of Bill and Doris McWilliams. Her father was a department chief at Western Electric; her mother, a politician, served on the Caddo Parish Police Jury and was president of the Louisiana League of Women Voters. The McWilliams family moved to New Jersey when Sanders was six. A few years later they moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Sanders grew up. It was while she was a student at Captain Shreve High School that Sanders was introduced to computer programming by her advanced math teacher, Sandra McCalla. Sanders learned how to program in the Fortran and BASIC computing languages, knowledge that provided a base for her focus in college and beyond.

After graduating from high school, Sanders attended Colorado State University for one year before transferring to Louisiana State University. Majoring in computer science, she was one of only a few women to enter this field at the time. A diligent student, Sanders graduated summa cum laude and won the President's Medal and Distinguished Achievement Award. She was also a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Degree in hand, she and the man she would later marry, Bruce Sanders, moved to Boulder, Colorado. She enrolled at the University of Colorado as a graduate student in computer science, earning a master of science degree in 1978. While still a graduate student, she also worked at AT&T Bell Labs as a member of the technical staff. Her oldest sister, Mary, is also a computer scientist; her other sister, Marjorie, is a lawyer.

Life's Work

Sanders remained at Bell Labs for seventeen years. She became research and development manager in 1982 and served as research and development director from January 1995 to August 1996 when she assumed the position of chief technology officer (CTO). As CTO, she was in charge of more than six hundred engineers and managed an annual budget of $110 million. In 1996, her work on leading-edge software architectures for telecommunications—including an operating system called Oryx/Pecos that helped pave the way for the use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in enterprise telephony systems—earned her a Bell Labs Fellow Award, the highest recognition for technical achievement within the company. Sanders holds several communications technology patents.

In May 1999, when the communications and call center businesses left Lucent to form Avaya, Inc., Sanders left Lucent Bell Labs to become vice president of research and development and CTO for Avaya, CRM Solutions, and Avaya Labs, where she continued to work in systems-level software and solutions. She remained in this position until August 2001. She accepted the position of executive in residence at the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society (ATLAS) at the University of Colorado at Boulder in September 2001. ATLAS is an interdisciplinary program that combines liberal arts and technology to prepare students for careers in the networked information age.

Concerned by the under-representation of women among computer science graduates and in the professional fields of information technology and computing, Sanders agreed to cofound and serve as founding CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). In May 2004, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had awarded $3.25 to establish NCWIT, a collaborative effort among universities, industry, government, and nonprofits led by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. The award, spread over a four-year period, was the largest education and workforce award ever made by NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate. Additional start-up funds were provided by Avaya, Microsoft, Pfizer, Bank of America, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, the Kauffman Foundation, and Qualcomm.

On May 18, 2004, with Sanders at the helm, NCWIT was launched. The center committed to identifying the research and interventions that could best attract and retain women in information technology, increase the effectiveness of existing efforts, and build a united, national platform for progress. The goal was to achieve parity for women in the professional information technology (IT) workforce, in both academia and industry, with measurable, tangible progress achieved within twenty years. Sanders declared that the NCWIT would “build a national movement for change.” Over the next six years, she led the fund-raising that resulted in corporate contributions of $24 million.

By 2012, the consortium collaborating to achieve the twenty-year goal of NCWIT included almost three hundred academic institutions, government agencies, corporations, and nonprofits. The consortium, organized into alliances, allows the center to serve as a learning community that works toward reform across the full education and career spectrum. The K–12 Alliance strives to improve the image of computing and the teaching of foundational computing skills. The Academic Alliance brings together a diverse range of colleges and universities to implement institutional change in higher education. Founding members of the Academic Alliance include Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Florida State University, Indiana University, Smith College, Spelman College, Stanford University, Texas A&M University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Maryland–Baltimore County, the University of Texas–El Paso, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin. The Workforce Alliance leads NCWIT's efforts in corporate organizational reform. Industry Alliance founding members include Avaya, Bank of America, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun. The Entrepreneurial Alliance works with young companies to establish diversity at the start. The Affinity Group Alliance unites and communicates with technical women through professional groups. The Social Science Advisory Board provides NCWIT alliances with evaluation and research foundations.

Sanders announced in April 2011 that the NCWIT Entrepreneurial Alliance was joining President Barack Obama's Startup America Initiative. The center pledged to help high-tech start-ups capitalize on the increased innovation and business benefits of gender diversity in addition to promoting the achievements of women entrepreneurs. In her statement announcing NCWIT's participation, Sanders promised that the center would work with Startup America at the national level to ensure that technical start-ups received the resources they need to recruit, retain, and advance women in technology.

Personal Life

Sanders lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband, Bruce, an emeritus faculty member in computer science at the University of Colorado. The couple have two children. Zack is an Internet security specialist with his own company and a poker guru. Casey graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in marketing in 2012; he has worked in sports information. When she is not working, Sanders enjoys tending to her vegetable garden and traveling the world. She is also an enthusiastic runner with a particular fondness for Boulder's numerous walking trails.

Sanders has served on several high-tech start-up and nonprofit boards, and she frequently advises young technology companies. She is a trustee of the Colorado School of Mines, the Center for American Entrepreneurship, and the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served on the board of trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as on the Information Technology Research and Development Ecosystem Commission for the National Academies. In 2004, Sanders received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Engineering at the University of Colorado. In 2007, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. In 2011, the U.S. secretary of commerce appointed her to serve on the Department of Commerce's Innovation Advisory Board. In 2012, the Computing Research Association awarded the 2012 A. Nico Habermann Award to Sanders, along with Robert Schnabel (dean at the School of Informatics, Indiana University) and Telle Whitney (CEO and president of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology), for their joint efforts to establish and sustain the NCWIT and its dedication to encouraging greater participation of women in the development of computing technology. Sanders was inducted into the US News STEM Leaders Hall of Fame in 2013 and received the Bob Newman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Colorado Technology Association in 2016.

Bibliography

“Computer Science Awards.” Communications of the ACM May 2012: 16. Print. Announces the 2012 inductees into the National Investors Hall of Fame and the winners of the 2012 Computing Research Association A. Nico Habermann Award: Sanders, Robert Schnabel, and Telle Whitney.

“Improving Gender Composition in Computing.” Communications of the ACM 55.4 (2012): 29–31. Print. The article looks at the Pacesetters program of National Center for Women and Information Technology. The purpose of the program is to increase the number of women in computing careers in the United States by one thousand “Net New Women” by 2012.

“Lucy Sanders.” Computerworld 27 Feb. 2006: 45. Print. The article provides information about collaboration between the National Center for Women and Information Technology and Cisco, Systems to increase awareness of education and career opportunities for girls and women in science, technology, math, and engineering through a comprehensive digital library. One color photograph.

Margolis, Jane, et al. Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. Print. Includes a description of a 2006 conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, which brought together representatives from government, all levels of computer science education, the computer industry, and national organizations that share a commitment to broadening participation in computing.

Sanders, Lucy. “A Grand Challenge: Inspiring Women to Embrace IT Careers.” ColoradoBiz Sept. 2007: 13. Print. Refers to the NCWIT's interview with Donna Auguste, an entrepreneur who earned four patents for her work on the Apple Newton, as an example of what a woman inspired to enter information technology can accomplish. The article also cites NCWIT research that found that mixed-gender teams produced the most frequently cited patents; citation rates were 26 percent to 42 percent higher than the norm. Argues for the need to inspire more women to choose computing careers.