BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – Barbara Kerr Beckmann, ExxonMobil’s first female engineer and the longest-tenured employee in the company’s history, is retiring after a career that spanned 65 years and helped pave the way for generations of women in engineering.
Beckmann began her groundbreaking journey in 1961 when she became the first woman to earn an engineering degree from the University of Mississippi.
Soon after graduating, Exxon hired her as its first female engineer, bringing her to Baton Rouge at a time when engineering was overwhelmingly a male-dominated profession…