Dr. Phyllis A. Wallace
Dr. Phyllis A. Wallace earned the
faculty status of professor emerita of management within the Sloan
School of Management. She is a labor economist who pioneered the
study of sexual and racial discrimination in the workplace. Professor
Wallace spearheaded, through her scholarship, a precedent-setting
legal decision in a federal case that reversed sex and race
discrimination in American industry. She directed studies for a
federal lawsuit against American Telephone and Telegraph Co., then
the largest private employer in the United States. The suit led to a
1973 decision that the company had discriminated against women and
minority men. The company agreed to pay millions in back wages and to
make other pay adjustments. The verdict also brought about changes in
transfer and promotion policies and recruitment criteria.
The case, which Professor Wallace wrote
about in her book, Equal
Employment Opportunity and the AT&T Case (MIT
Press, 1976), was an extension of her own life, background and
interests. She continued to work in these areas after her retirement
and only recently had agreed to spend the next six months helping
Sloan School Dean Lester C. Thurow improve the school's response to
sexual harassment problems. She also had begun work on encouraging
minorities in the participation of activities at the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts.
In a letter to the Sloan faculty on her
passing in January 1993, Dean Thurow said that, as a labor economist,
Professor Wallace "widened all our knowledge." Her study of
Sloan School women graduates "made everyone wiser about the
issues of women attempting to advance in the business world," he
said. Professor Wallace was born in Baltimore, MD. She received a BA
degree in 1943 from New York University, an MA from Yale in 1944 and
her PhD from Yale in 1948.
After receiving her PhD, she joined the
National Bureau of Economic Research as an economist/statistician,
while also teaching part-time at the College of the City of New York.
She served on the faculty of Atlanta
University from 1953 to 1957, when she became a senior economist for
the US government specializing in Soviet economic studies. She was
chief of technical studies at the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission's Office of Research from 1966 to 1969 and vice president
of research for the Metropolitan Applied Research Center from 1969 to
1972. After serving as a visiting professor at the Sloan School, in
1975 she became the first woman to hold the rank of professor at the
school. When Mount Holyoke College conferred an honorary Doctor of
Laws degree on Professor Wallace in 1983, the citation said that as
an educator, public servant and scholar "your career has taken
you from the university to government to the corporate boardroom."
It continued: "Beginning your career at a time when neither
blacks nor women had a fair chance, you have seen great progress
toward equal employment opportunity-progress due in no small measure
to your scholarship on the economics of discrimination in the labor
market."
When she retired in 1986, scholars in
industrial and labor relations and economics from around the world
gathered at MIT for a conference in her honor. In addition, the Sloan
School endowed the Phyllis A. Wallace Doctoral Fellows Fund, which
provides support for blacks admitted to the school's doctoral
program, and the Phyllis A. Wallace Visiting Scholars Fund to provide
support for black visiting scholars at the school.
In addition to her many awards and
honors, she served on numerous national advisory committees and
corporate boards. Her books included Women, Minorities and Employment
Discrimination (1977), Pathways to Work: Employment Among Black
Teenage Females (1974), and Black Women in the Labor Force (1980).
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