And it was important work. Today, a quick glance at NASA's organization structure reveals a number of women in key roles, including Lesa Roe, who has served as NASA Langley's center director and is currently detailed as a deputy associate administrator for the agency; Ellen Stofan, who serves as chief scientist; and Elizabeth Robinson, who serves as chief financial officer.
"The reason these women are able to be in the positions they are and influencing the policy and the science that's being done at NASA today has very much to do with the female pioneers who came to NASA, and to its predecessor the NACA, back in the 1930s, the 1940s, through the 1950s and '60s," Shetterly said.
The first woman to break the gender barrier at NASA Langley — or what was then known as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory — was Pearl Young. She came to Langley in 1922 as an engineer, and eventually became the chief technical editor for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. A theater at the center now bears her name.
But an even bigger door opened in 1935 when a group of five women came to the center to form a computer pool. The idea was for these women to process all the data coming in from wind tunnel tests and flight tests. It began as an experiment, but became something much bigger.
"This turned out to be such an amazing thing that the numbers [of women] started to grow here," she said.
By 1942, the human computers had become essential to operations at the center. A memo that circulated that April put it this way:
"The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could."
Langley also began recruiting African-American women as human computers in the 1940s, but due to segregation laws these "West Area Computers" were kept separate from their white counterparts.
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