I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I found the book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly filled with inspiring lessons for women, still relevant in these days that are long past the 1940s-1970s.

Hidden Figures is the story of a group of highly intelligent, even brilliant, African-American women who worked as “computers” at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Va. They started their jobs during the still segregated times of the 1940s, when the country was united in defeating the Axis powers of World War II. These women persevered to help the country eventually catch up and beat the Soviets in the space race.

Here are five lessons that struck me as I read about Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Goble Johnson and Christine Darden.

The ability to defend your work gets you noticed.

Lee writes that the best women mathematicians were known for accuracy, speed and insight. “But having the independence of mind and the strength of the personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds in the world — that’s what got you noticed…That’s what marked you as someone who should move ahead.” 

To advance in your career, you have to get close to where ideas are created. 

Not easy to execute, but essential to moving up the career ladder, was mounting a different plan of attack than just holding on to your job. Lee writes about the changes taking place in the late 1950s  — the beginning of the space race and the end of segregation at Langley — and the need for the African-American female employees to evolve, too. “If a woman wanted to get promoted, she had to leave the computing pool and attach herself to the elbow of an engineer, figure out how to sit at the controls of a wind tunnel, fight for the credit on a research report. To move up, she had to get as close as she could to the room where the ideas were being created.” 

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Keep asking until you get the answer you want. 

Persistence pays off. Lee gives the example of Katherine Goble Johnson putting aside any personal insecurities to ask her superiors repeatedly to let her attend the important editorial meetings, where research findings were picked apart and had to be defended. Johnson figured she had as much right as her male engineer colleagues to be there, and so she kept up her inquiries, “gentle but persistent,” until she basically wore down the engineers who got tired of saying no.  Lee writes: “Who were they, they must have figured, to stand in the way of someone so committed to making a contribution, so convinced of the quality of her contributions that she was willing to stand up to the men whose success — or failure — might tip the balance of the outcome of the Cold War?” 

Serendipity, not luck, plays a part in your career.

With modesty and years later, Johnson would claim it was luck that she of all the female “computers” was sent to work in an engineering group that eventually focused on putting a man in space and then on the moon. But Lee dismisses that, writing that “simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance. It was serendipity that called her in the countdown of John Glenn’s flight.”

Help the young women and men coming behind you. 

The fact that these “women computers” gave countless hours to talking to African-American high school students about careers in math and engineering, inspiring them, and mentoring them one-on-one, is not insignificant. In the 21st Century, it’s pretty much a given that if you are a successful person in whatever field, you should be a mentor. But back when good jobs were so scarce for women, especially black women, it would have been easy to just focus on their own careers. But Lee devotes a significant amount of space to chronicling how the women in her book spent nights and weekends speaking on career panels, raising money for scholarships, and so on.

Writing about Mary Jackson, Lee notes “Mary, however, was determined to clamor over every fence she encountered and pull everyone she knew behind her.” And later in the book, talking about women, both black and white: “Each one had cracked the hole in the wall a little wider, allowing the next talent to come through. And now that Mary had walked through, she was going to open the wall as wide as possible for the people coming behind her.”

I finished reading Hidden Figures carrying each of these women inside my head and my heart, inspired by how they overcame so many challenges. I’m thankful to Margot Lee Shetterly for uncovering this unseen story.

What books have you read lately that have offered you inspiring lessons?

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