Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson. You may have heard these names, especially if you’ve read the book or seen the movie Hidden Figures. These amazing women broke through world views and social injustices their whole lives as they rose to play vital roles in bringing our country forward in the space race.
As the title says, these women were hidden their whole careers. They worked in the background, most of the time going unseen by the world. However, as we now look back, we can see just how important they were.
In the 1960s, the United States was locked in a space race with the Russians. The Russians beat the U.S. to space, but the U.S. was determined to get someone in orbit and to the moon as soon as possible. Because of their great need for help, NACA (now, NASA) started hiring women with college degrees. There was a group of African American Women hired that included Vaughan, Jackson, and Johnson.
The main role of this group was to be “human calculators”. They were the people who made the trajectory calculations for the astronauts especially for John Glenn, who was the first American in orbit. Later, some of these women became engineers and computer programmers.
As segregation was still a large part of life in the 1940s-60s, the calculators faced many hardships with fighting to be recognized and respected in the workplace. The challenges that came from being an African American woman in a white male dominated workplace must have been extremely hard, but Vaughan, Jackson, Johnson, and more pushed through and were able to set an amazing example for us today.
Dorothy Vaughan was a math teacher in Virginia until she was hired temporarily in 1943 because there was a shortage of men due to World War II. When the war ended, she was kept on because of an executive order that banned discrimination in the defense industry. She became the first African American NACA supervisor in 1949, and oversaw the West Area Computing section. When NACA became NASA in 1958, they created an Analysis and Computation Department. Vaughan became one of the first people in the department to figure out how the computer worked and she became an expert programmer. She died in 2008 at age 98.
Mary Jackson got a degree in science and also began as a teacher. She joined the West Area Computing section and worked with wind tunnels and flight experiments to take the data from them. She later became an engineer. She also helped many more women get the necessary education or boost to help their careers, many of which became supervisors. She retired in 1985 and died in 2005 at age 83.
Katherine Johnson went to high school at age 13 and college at 18. She became a schoolteacher as well. She was offered a spot in college later, but decided to have kids instead. She joined the West Area Computing section in 1953. Her calculations were used in a lecture series. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Sheperd’s flight and John Glenn reportedly asked her to check his as well. She later helped calculate project Apollo’s Lunar Lander and the space shuttle. She was rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and died in February 2020 at age 101.
Although these women faced a lot of challenges in their career, they were able to persist and push through discrimination and inequality to become amazing influencial mathematicians and engineers. We can learn from their courageous examples that if we keep fighting for what we really want, we can find a way.
Written by: Kylie Broce
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