The Costco Connection - February 2017

BY STEPHANIE E. PONDER

WHILE Margot Lee Shetterly was home for Christmas in ;;;;, her father regaled her and her husband, Aran, with stories about the many black women who worked as human computers for NASA and its predecessor, NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics).

Shetterly’s father worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and his daughter had grown up listening to similar stories. However, it wasn’t until she heard these stories anew that she decided to dig a little deeper. The result is the book—and film—Hidden Figures. Using the space race, racial segregation, gender politics and more as a backdrop, Shetterly tells the story of the many black women, such as Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, whose work at NACA and NASA, starting in the mid-;;;;s, helped the United States achieve some of its greatest aeronautic successes.

During three years of research, Shetterly turned to newspapers, NASA research reports, employee newsletters, photos and personal accounts.

“It wasn’t that nobody knew about these women or that there wasn’t even documentary evidence of them. It was just that it was in so many different places,” Shetterly, a Costco member, tells The Connection from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

One of the human computers, Johnson, now ;; and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in ;;;;, served as an invaluable source of information for the book. “She was the one who first told me about Dorothy Vaughan, who had been the head of the segregated West Area Computing group,” says Shetterly of the woman who calculated flight trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbital flight.

“The more I started digging … there were just so many women,” says Shetterly.

“It [is] a story of women being
good at math as a mat-
ter of routine. It
wasn’t like, ‘Oh,
that one woman, she was so good.’ Here is a
story of … perhaps more than ;,;;;
women, over the course of decades, excel-
ling at math and helping propel American
aeronautics in the space program.”
The sheer number of women who
worked as computers led Shetterly to
start The Human Computer Project (the
humancomputerproject.com) as a way to
acknowledge their work. She explains,
“The core of it is really a database of all the
women who worked as computers, data
analysts, mathematicians … [during] the
golden era of NASA.”
Before deciding to write Hidden
Figures, her first book, Shetterly worked in
banking and internet media, and most
recently, with her husband, created an
English-language magazine for expats liv-
ing in Mexico. When The Connection
caught up with her, it was a few days before
screenings of the film—for which Shetterly
served as a consultant—at Harvard and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The previous week, Shetterly attended a
screening in her hometown for the NASA
community and the families of the women
who worked for NASA and NACA.

“The overwhelming sentiment has
been so positive, which is both super grat-
ifying and also a huge relief,” Shetterly
says of the book and the film. “Most
importantly, Katherine Johnson loves it.
She and her family really thought that
[Hidden Figures] did honor and justice to
her legacy, and the legacy of those women
and the legacy of NASA, and the people
they worked with.”
Shetterly’s hope for Hidden Figures?
“I really hope that it changes the percep-
tion of what a scientist and mathemati-
cian look like. And not just for black
women, or black people or women. It’s for
a little black girl to look in the mirror and
say, ‘Hey, I look like a scientist.’ That’s
amazing and transformative. I think [it’s
important] for the rest of the country, too,
to say, ‘Listen, any of us could have done
this work, as evidenced by the fact that
they did this work.’ ” C