Onde Dorothy Vaughan Katherine Johnson E Mary Jackson Trabalham?
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Beginning in 1935, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a precursor of NASA, hired hundreds of women as computers. The job title described someone who performed mathematical equations and calculations by hand, according to a NASA history. The computers worked at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recruited Jackson in 1951. She started as a research mathematician, or computer, in the segregated West Area Computing Section. Jackson began taking graduate-level physics and mathematics classes at night in order to become an engineer. In 1958, she was promoted to aerospace engineer and became NASA’s first black female engineer. Over the next 20 years, Jackson reached the highest senior-level title within the engineering department.
As a computer with the all-black West Area Computing section, she was involved with wind tunnels and flight experiments. Her job was to extract the relevant data from flight tests. She also tried to help other women advance in their career, according to the biography, by advising them on what educational opportunities to pursue.
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"She discovered that occasionally it was something as simple as a lack of a couple of courses, or perhaps the location of the individual, or perhaps the assignments given them, and of course, the ever present glass ceiling that most women seemed to encounter," Champine wrote.
After 30 years with NACA and NASA (at which point she was an engineer), Jackson decided to become an equal opportunity specialist to help women and minorities. Although described as a behind-the-scenes sort of worker, she helped many people get promoted or become supervisors. She retired from NASA in 1985. Jackson died on Feb. 11, 2005 at the age of 83.
Allison Schroeder: Oh yeah, I mean I'm the co-chair of the Women's Committee at the Guild and on the Diversity Advisory Group, so this is kind of my mission and I've been writing scripts like this for years and a lot of the times nobody would pay attention or nobody would buy them or people would buy them and change them drastically. I can't tell you how many times I've written scripts where it was a diverse cast and it gets cast as all white. And it's just crushing to me because, for instance, I have two best friends from Stanford that are Indian and there's a character that's a composite of their names in almost every script, and it has yet to make it to screen. So this film was sort of pure wish-fulfillment for me to write. And it's kind of a wish-fulfillment script for the ladies—they worked their asses off and it's totally true, but their dreams came true.Who are you looking for?
The 2016 movie Hidden Figures tells the incredible story of these three women. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson crossed gender and racial lines, to bring their talent and brilliance to the space program. Their names and contributions deserve to be kept alive and given a prominent place in America’s history.
Vaughan joined the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1943 after beginning her career as a math teacher in Farmville, Virginia. Her job during World War II was a temporary position, but thanks in part to a new executive order prohibiting discrimination in the defense industry, she was hired on permanently because the laboratory had a wealth of data to process.
Dorothy Vaughan (1910-2008)
During World War II, the computer pool was expanded. Langley began recruiting African-American women with college degrees to work as computers, according to NASA. However, segregation policies required that these women work in a separate section, called the West Area Computers — although computing sections became more integrated after the first several years.
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Her Story: Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) was one of the first African-American women to work a NASA as a Scientist. She was born in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia and enrolled in high school at age 10. At age 18 she graduated with the highest honors from college earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and french. She became a human-computer for NASA, initially assigned tho the West Area Computers, then reassigned to the Guidance and Control Division. Due to state segregation laws, Johnson and the other African-American women were required to work, take breaks and use restrooms completely separate from their white peers. This was not only a logistical hardship, but it was also racist and demeaning.
I really did enjoy seeing the husbands being supportive on screen. So often, black men on screen are portrayed as controlling or unsupportive so I found this very realistic. Was that important for you?Explore This Park
In the 1960s, astronauts Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn and others absorbed the accolades of being America's first men in space. They reached the orbit with the nation's first crewed space program, project Mercury. Behind the scenes, their triumphs were enabled by hundreds of unheralded NASA workers, including "human computers" who calculated their orbital trajectories. "Hidden Figures," a 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly and a movie based on the book, celebrates the contributions of some of those workers.
Segregation was ended in 1958 when NACA became NASA, at which point NASA created an analysis and computation division. Vaughan was an expert programmer in FORTRAN, a prominent computer language of the day, and also contributed to a satellite-launching rocket called Scout (Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test). She retired from NASA in 1971. Vaughan died on Nov. 10, 2008 at the age of 98.