Re: We only have her word for it
Companies don't generally fire people who are making them money just because they're A) A women or B) old. That would be corporate suicide.
Ah, but corporations do commit suicide all the time, don't they? I believe that they have a lifecycle. Small startup that's quality and service oriented. Then they start to grow and tend to lose focus a bit. Then they get big and powerful, then full of hubris and start running things by whim, having internal warfare and/or invent other idiotic policies and practices which eventually kill them. Then they start to shrink with lots of redundancies and, often, even sillier policies and either sell out or turn into patent trolls. IBM comes to mind.
From everything I've heard about them, Oracle is a company that will shaft its customers and employees. This may or may not be true, but I've heard it enough that I would certainly be unlikely to contract with them. Considering the insanity of what's been happening with the quality of Windows X, MS appears to be heading down "Suicide Alley," too. It's all too common, I'm afraid.