Kinsman took her system design company to Seattle in the late 1980s to be closer to family. These days, she spends more of her time helping care for her 98-year-old mother. While she considers herself retired, she still volunteers in the industry and mentors a young woman at Comcast in the Northwest. Her name carries a lot of weight. In 2010, she was the first woman to be inducted into the SCTE Hall of Fame. She was also the first woman to be elected to SCTE’s board and the first female Member of the Year. Musing on gender discrimination, Kinsman says it was always under the surface since she was hired into cable in Denver in 1972. “However it never stopped the engineers in this industry from sharing and teaching me, to the point that I could create my own system design company, write my own design program, and be awarded 1,500 miles of cable plant as my first job, eventually having 11 women and one man working at my company,” she says. “In fact, I’d say cable TV was much more open to women than my first company—Boeing… Great engineers from around the world, but I couldn’t go on a test flight because there weren’t female restrooms!”
