Doing science 'backwards, in high heels' - NASA's 'hidden' human computers

Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929:

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young – alas, she never wrote a word… she lives in you and me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.”

Nearly 90 years later, the work of finding those women whose lives sit beneath the surface of our collective cultural memory is still ongoing. Projects such as Finding Ada and WikiProject Women Artists are organized, strategic efforts to rewrite history to include the contribution of women in science and the arts, both in the past, and in contemporary culture. However, such strategic efforts, because of the structure of Wikipedia, which emphasizes the validity of secondary sources over primary sources;and influenced heavily by what historical sources are easily available, digitized, creative commons licensed, and in English; are often Eurocentric, focusing on restoring the histories of white middle class women.

This is particularly true of efforts in the sciences, where the names of Ada Lovelace, Mary Anning, Hedy Lamarr, Rosalind Franklin have become a kind of code of their own, a indicator of taking women in science seriously, because they’ve been mentioned, their hidden stories revealed. While revising the history of science to recognize the contributions of women is hugely important, this work must be intersectional. That is, it must seek to move beyond a reliance on written, secondary sources as valid evidence for an individual’s inclusion as a Wikipedia entry or other easily accessible resource. In the interim, the work people are doing to write and develop excellent, thoroughly researched, and community-embedded secondary sources which examine the historical impact of women of colour or indigenous women provides opportunity for these women’s histories to be made official – googleable. (The work of decolonizing the algorithms needs to be done also.)

Hidden Figures, both the 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly, and the 2016 film, based on Shetterly’s book and directed by Theodore Melfi, does much to counter this focus on restoring women’s history being about white women. In a popular account which glosses over the Civil Rights Movement and touches only briefly on equal pay, the film centres the brilliance, wit, bravery, and humanity of Katherine G. Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan – and in doing so centres and valorizes the communities and families which produced and supported them, a powerful counternarrative to contemporary depictions of black lives, such as the easy way in which Trump so recently dismissed Senator John Lewis with words that equated ‘Black/urban/crime-ridden/rundown’.

Hidden Figures celebrates the essential contributions of Johnson, Jackson, and Vaughan – the scene in which Dorothy Vaughan, who has taught herself Fortran with the help of a book she was forced to steal from the public library as it was in the whites-only section, gets the IBM supercomputer going, to the shock of the IBM men who have been trying to do this for weeks – is deeply, viscerally, satisfying; as is the sheer brilliance of Johnson’s maths, calculating the go/no-go landing zone for John Glenn’s successful orbit of the Earth. Mary Jackson too, who fought so hard to be the first African-American woman engineer at NASA, doing night classes in a segregated high school where the instructor tells her that the examples haven’t been designed for women. Johnson, running in her dress-code mandated high heels across the Langley campus, reminding me of the quip about Ginger Rogers, who did everything the same as Fred Astaire, except ‘backwards, in high heels.’

But the film also, searingly, reminds us, the audience, of all the people whose contributions might never get to be made, if science, society, does not dismantle the structures of patriarchy, racism, colonization, imperialism, ableism. Imagine if all the other geniuses could take their rightful place.*

*With thanks to @niais (Dr Sarah Tuttle) from whose tweet this phrase comes: https://twitter.com/niais/status/517520415132889088

Suggested further reading:

Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s excellent Decolonizing Science reading list is a fantastic starting point

Essential reading for anyone interested in the project to decolonize our academies is Professor Linda Tuhiwai-Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

More on Margot Lee Shetterly's The Human Computer Project here.