So they hired these women to come in and do these really detailed intricate calculations, leaving the male engineers to do more of the design work and hands-on work with machinery.Īfrican-American women, like those celebrated in Hidden Figures, had many additional challenges as part of this workforce. And then they also viewed women as detail oriented and having an ability to kind of stick to a task more. They also had this interesting notion that the women could do the calculations faster because their hands were smaller. First of all, they were a whole lot cheaper to hire than men. It was a combination of many things that today we probably would laugh at or be angry at. Lawrimore says there were a few reasons that women dominated this field: By the time Tucker left in 1947 there were over 400 women doing computations for NASA. When Tucker was hired in 1935, there were just five women in the computer pool. She was taking huge amounts of data that were coming in from wind tunnels, and flight tests, and things like that, and she was using things like slide rules and charts, and to be honest, just her math knowledge to make these really intricate calculations that let the NACA engineers perfect and design their planes." "Her work as a human computer basically meant that she was doing most of the computation.
According to UNCG archivist Erin Lawrimore, Virginia Tucker's pioneering work in aeronautics and mechanical engineering led to her being one of the first women hired as a human computer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor of NASA. The history leading up to the events in the film can be traced back to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's class of 1930, and trailblazer Virginia Tucker. The film celebrates women and math, and examines the struggles of women in the workforce and race relations in the 1960s. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, the African-American women who computed for NASA. The Oscar nominated film Hidden Figures tells the story of Katherine G.
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