This picture just screams “nigga move, I’ll do it.”
Yall don’t know how it feels to see a picture like this, when I can count the number of black women in my major on my hand. Like this is not a field they expect us to succeed in or want to learn. So to see THIS, all of these black women, confident in their own intelligence and the only ones who knew how to get shit done, it made me feel less alone
I hope this movie reminds everyone that women, including black women, have always been vital to the development of technology.
Women worked as computers at JPL from the very start, because that was how you calculated complex trajectories before electronic computers…you had a room full of good mathematicians. And they were women.
http://www.space.com/34619-women-computers-of-nasa-jpl.html
The fourth slide of this show clearly shows Janez Lawson, the first African-American hired to a technical position at JPL. She later became a successful chemical engineer.
(We forget that “computer” meant a person from the early 17th century all the way through to the 1970s).
In 1942, a memo at Langley said “The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could.”
We need to keep this history front and center so that young women know they have always had a place at the table.
Don’t forget that Johnson became an engineer and Darden, another of Langley’s computers, became one of NASA’s experts on sonic booms and was the first African-American woman to be promoted from Langley into the senior executive service.
Girls: You can do it. If you want to be an engineer, do it. If you want to be a computer scientist, do it.
Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t.
