Sara "Sally" Lynn Hacker (née Swank, September 25, 1936 – July 24, 1988) was a feminist sociologist who investigated cultures surrounding technology. She was interested in how changes in technology affected gender stratification.
Hacker was born and raised in Litchfield, Illinois.[1] In her junior year of high school, she was expelled for becoming pregnant with her son.[1] After expulsion, she attended A.A. Wright Junior College and later won a scholarship to the University of Chicago (U of C). She graduated from U of C with a bachelor's degree in 1962, a master's degree in 1965 and a doctorate in 1969.[1] Her dissertation, "Patterns of World and Leisure: An Investigation of the Relationships between Childhood and Current Styles of Leisure and Current Work Behavior among Young Women Graduates in the Field of Public Education" was supervised by Alice Rossi.[1]
Hacker worked for Rossi, Phil Stone and Fred Stodtbeck as a research assistant at the U of C and also at Harvard University.[1] In the late 1960s she worked as a clinical instructor in psychiatry for the Baylor University College of Medicine and as a staff sociologist at the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences in Houston.[1] In the 1970s, she studied women and technology at AT&T (Bell Company.) Her research found that while AT&T claimed to promote hiring initiatives for minorities and women, the reality was that women and minorities were hired mainly for jobs "next to be automated."[2]
From 1971 to 1976, she was an assistant professor of sociology at Drake University.[1] While in Iowa, Hacker and her husband, Barton Hacker, founded the Des Moines chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW).[1]
Hacker went on to attend engineering classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and architecture classes at the Linn-Benton Community College in order to better understand technology and its relationship to gender stratification.[1] While at MIT, Hacker explored students' reasons for going into engineering.[3]
She was a professor of sociology at Oregon State University (OSU) from 1977 until 1988.[4] Hacker died of lung cancer in Corvallis, Oregon July 24, 1988.[1]
In 1989, her last book, published posthumously, Pleasure, Power, and Technology: Some Tales of Gender, Engineering, and the Cooperative Workplace was highly praised.[5]
The American Sociological Association awards a graduate student paper award each year in her memory.[6] In 1999, an annual award called the Sally Hacker Prize was established by the Society for the History of Technology.[7] This award recognizes "exceptional scholarship that reaches beyond the academy toward a broad audience."[8]