Study, mrs. Hols also conducted research at the jet Propulsion Library on the history of women in america at harvard. The first book. It is written widely for prominent publications. The los angeles time, the atlan atlantic. The rise of the rocket girls, the women who propelled us from missiles, to the moon, to mars. That work was a best seller and was widely praised bring critics including one who described it as immersive, e vvocative. Another called it a marvelous book adding when Neil Armstrong made his leap for mankind, there was woman kind in the control room. It is a plash, pleasure indeed to welcome nathalia holt. I am excited to talk to you about rocket girls. The sevecareers shaped nasa andt it is today. Now before i get into their histories, i want to share with you just a small slice of my own history. And that is because i cant to the book in a very unusual way. I came to boston, i was pregnant and expecting my first baby. We argued other names, we made long lists, and nothing seemed right. Then my husband out of the blue suggested the name eleanor francis. And when i first heard the name i thought im not sure it sounds a little old fashioned. So i googled the name. And the first person to come up in my search was elenor francis hellen. She was accepting an award at nasa. I had no idea that women worked at nasa at this time, much less a scientist. I knew i had to learn more. What i found was francis wasnt. She was one of a large group of women who worked at a place called the jet Propulsion Laboratory or jpl in pasadena, california. Now jpl has a really fascinating history itself. It was founded by a group that were called the suicide squad. They received the name because of the very dangerous experiments they performed on the call tech campus where some them were students and some were young people who liked to fire off rockets and explode things. So they did a lot of that on campus. They set off an explosion in the engineering building, which rusted a brand new and expensive wind tunnel. They blasted off the side of the building reigning bricks down on students below. It was at this point that the administrators at cal tech said, okay, this is enough. You guys have to leave. This is where they went to the isolated canyon outside of pasadena where they could set off the rockets in peace. Its important to note in this period of history its the late 1930s. Rocket science is considered a fringe science. No serious scientist or engineer would ever aspire to be a rocket scientist. In fact, their professors would tell them it is impublic. You would never be able to send a rocket to space. There was a woman who was part of the suicide squad and her name was barbie. And this is one of the earliest known computers. His name was Alexis Claude and he was an 18th century french mathematician and astronomer. In the late 1700s, he was working on calculating the return of haleys comet. He had been brought on to the project to work as a computer. He was working with a woman. The two of them spent long hours calculating the gravitational pull of the planets to determine an exact date for the return of this comet. In 1756, they presented their results to the scientific community. However, only his name was on the paper and the female computer was left off. This would be the first in a long line of female computers not being acknowledged for their work. This is is a group of computers who worked in the 1800s at the harvard observatory. They were responsible for analyzing the vast amount of data coming into the observatory. They made star classification system and created maps of the sky. The female sex is more detailed oriented, they said. Better suited to this type of work. But the real reason may be they could be be paid a lot less. They worked six days a week and made about 25 to 50 cents an hour. Now the number of computers in the United States got a big boost in 1938 as part of the Works Progress administration. When the u. S. Government hired 450 computers. 76 of them were women. Their supervisor was a woman, too. Her name was Gertrude Blanch and had a ph. D. In mathematics. This group of computers worked on something special. They were creating the mathematical tables project which was a 28volume set of exponential functions and trig momty that would one day form our first steps into space. The first person to work with these books at the jet Propulsion Laboratory was barr by cantright. They were the first two computers to be working at this brand new lab and they were working on something called jet assisted takeoff. And the idea here is that they and the suicide squad were strapping on their homemade rockets on to the side of these light fixed wing aircraft. And their plan they could adapt this technology to one day power bombers over oceans. After many failures and, yes, some explosion, they ended up having some success. In 1939, they received a grant from the u. S. Government and officially marked the lab. Now with this new grant money, richard was promoted to the position of engineer. It was barbie. This is how it was. Men were engineers and women were seen as computers. Now the lab needed to hire a few more computers so they hired two women and one man. And one of these women would be important to the future of the laboratory. And her name was macy roberts. Now macy roberts, in 1940, was named head of the computing section. This was a big deal at the time. There were no other female heads. So she took this responsibility seriously. Especially as the lab was expanding. She interviewed both men and women for the job of computers. However, she decided that she would only hire women. The reason for this, she felt if she hired a man, they wouldnt listen to her simply because she was a woman. And so macy hired a lot of women. They came from all over the country. They do all types of background and experience level. The woman in the center was the first africanamerican hired in a technical position in the laboratory. She had a bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering from ucla. So today she would be hired as an engineer. Back then she was hired as a computer. So these women worked with paper and pencil and these fairly bulky machines called calculators despite their size could do surprisingly little. Early models could do addition and subtraction and later they theyre working on missiles such as this one. The real love was space exploration. We see it in the 1950s when the women start adapting their design for the sergeant missile into a rocket called jupiter sea. To do this, the women take their calculations from the sergeant but create a scaled down version called the baby sergeant. They take 12 of these and they place them in a big spinning tunnel. The women told me they decided to balance the thrust of all the different rockets. They placed two of these big spinning tubs on top of a large red stone rocket and at the very peak was a single baby sergeant whose aim was to launch the worlds first satellite. In september 1956, they launched it. And the women who are in the control room that night told me how exciting the launch was. It broke speed and altitude record. But at its peak, there was no satellite. In fact, it was weighed down with sandbags. The reason is because the Eisenhower Administration had not given them the go ahead to launch a satellite. So you can imagine how frustrated they were less than a month later when the soviet Union Launches sputnik on october 4th, 1957. In fact, the women i talked to are still angry about this. Its very frustrating because they know if given the opportunity, they could have launched before them. So on december 31st, 1958, the group and jpl assembles to launch explorer one. Now there are many women who are part of this launch but none as more important than woman named barbara. On this evening, she is the one responsible for calculating the trajectory of the satellite. So to do this, she is sitting in a light table with paper and pencil. Just remember shes doing it all by hand. And standing over her shoulder are richard, the famous physicist, and the president of cal tech and everyone in the room is waiting on her calculations to find out if this mission will be a success. Its an incredible movement. Its also the birth of nasa. After explorer one, everything changes. The women leave military design behind and are now focussed on space. Now things are also changing for barbara here, too. Macy roberts is now retiring and barbara worked there for a decade, at this point, has been promoted to supervisor of the computing section. Shes also 30 years old. Shes about to get married, and about to start a family. And in 1960, only 25 of mothers worked outside the home. But barbara decides she lot of loves her job, she feels her work is too important, and she definitely wants to stay. You can imagine somehow shocked she is when 8 months pregnant, the labs administrators learn shes expecting and immediately fire her. They tell her that she is an insurance liability. It doesnt matter shes supervisor and she has done such important work for the lab, she has to pack up her things and leave that day. She goes home and cries i thought i was worth more than that. Fortunately barb are is able to come back and have a 45year at nasa. Shes able to do thanks to a woman named ellen lang, you can see in the second row here. Ellen was born in china. She came to the United States for college and in 1953, she was hired by macy roberts to work at jpl. And pretty much right away everyone realizes that ellen is special. All the engineers want her to be working with them. Its natural for her to take over the role of supervisor after barbara has been fired. Like barbara, shes 30 years old, just gotten married, and about to start a family. She decides to learn from barbaras example and hides her pregnancy for as long as she can then when its time to have the baby, because there is no Maternity Leave at this time, she combines all of her sick and Vacation Time so she can take some months off. By doing this, shes able to retain her supervisor position. And as she comes back to work, she decides that its not enough just for her to be there as a working mom. She wants to bring back other mothers. She ends up calling barbara and many, many others and asked if they wanted to come back. This is an interesting time in technology. Because ibm computers are only just now in the early 1960s coming into use at nasa. It was a little later than some other industries in adopting these Electronic Computers. What i found is at most nasa centers, once Electronic Computers came in, the people who worked as Human Computers were largely fired. I have a few examples of this. Just two here. Not too far from here. Youve probably heard the story of the africanamerican computers who worked at langley in the bril lantliantly told bo hidden figures. In the bottom is a group from the armstrong fire and research center. Once ibm computers came in the 60s, almost all the women were fired. It happened across the country. It did not happen at the jet Propulsion Laboratory. Instead, it was the women who were trained there as the first computer programmers. They were the ones who worked on ibms like this. Its this group of women who write the first programs who send American Spacecraft to the moon and to the planets. They do it on cards like this. In my research, i was curious why it is. Why is jpl so different from many of the other centers. And what i found is that at most nasa centers, they were formed from military bases. That couple churl was different than jpl, which was formed by the suicide squad. Because of his association with cal tech, it always had a very quirky academic feel. It still does today. It feels different. Despite working in such a progressive place, the women, of course, were still subject to gender norms of the day. One i found most surprising were the beauty contests. So the lab held misguided missiles. Later renamed the queen of outer space and women from all over the lab would compete in these contests. My favorite story happens in 1964. As part of the rangers series mission. It was the goal to send the first camera to the moon in order to take the first close up images of the lunar surface and inform possible landing sites for apollo. By 1964, this was proving impossible. There had been five failed missions. Tlvgs a real feeling if we cant send a camera to the moon, how are we going to get astronauts there . So the director of the laboratory flew to d. C. And sat with president johnson on an open phone line to Mission Control back at the lab in pasadena as they heard a live feed of ranger 6 as it approached the lunar surface. You can imagine what the room is like. Its quiet, its tense, everyone is waiting. Suddenly they hear a voice. Spray on avon and walk in fragrant beauty. Where is the voice coming from . Surely its not coming from the moon. Then they realize in pasadena theyve switched feeds with the ongoing queen of outer space contest. This is an embarrassing moment. Even worse when they learned that ranger six has also failed. At the same time in 1964 were struggling to get a camera 238,000 miles to the moon, were successfully able to launch mariner 4, 162 million miles to mars. This mission was exciting at the time. It was the first time we had ever sent a camera to another planet. It took eight and a half hours for the data from those photographs to be beamed back to earth. And then even after they were beamed back, it would take many more hours for the Electronic Computers to resolve the images and create real photographs. They could not wait. They were too excited to see what was going on the photographs. As soon as the data started coming back, they started printing out the data in strips. They pasted the strips on to a wall of the lab and then they created this cute color by numbers system for their data where they assigned each range of data its own color. Then the group began coloring in the blavngs. In each number. At this point, the Media Relations people at the lab are getting pretty nervous. You could make the argument its more beautiful than the real photographs. Certainly more colorful, at least. Despite the jaunlts to venus and mars, we did eventually get to the moon. Ranger 7 took it and the took picture of the sea of tranquility. Even the first words one small step was made possible because of the deep Space Network that the women labored to build. Something else remarkable happened in 1969, the women finally became engineers. This was a big deal. Not only did they get a pay raise, but they felt they were finally getting the recognition they deserved. This is helen lang, super of the group at this time. She decides as exciting as it is for them to be engineers, she wants to bring in more female engineers into her group. This is not so easy to do. And thats because at this time most engineering schools are still closed to women. Helen devices a plan to work around it. She begins seeking out women who have bachelor degrees in math and Computer Science. She hires them in the lab, trains them, and then sends them to a local night school for engineering. Its a good thing she does because the female engineers are needed for a very exciting mission that the lab is about to embark on called the grand tour. This mission took advantage of the alignment of the planets in order to spend a spacecraft to the outer planets. The group at jpl was dreaming of looking at planets that no spacecraft had gone to before. The group at jpl felt it was unacceptable. They had to take advantage of this moment. And so a small group of engineers, including sylvia miller, who had been hired and trained by ellen, came in one weekend with the goal of saving the grand tour. They came up with the trajectory with something that uses gravity assist. They used the gravitational pull of the planets to act like a slingshot, sending a spacecraft farther and farther into space. And by doing so, they were able to save costs by cutting down on the size of the spacecraft and how much fuel they needed to use. They went all the way to the outer planets. They changed textbooks for the time but gave all the beautiful images and the voyagers are still going. Voyager 1 in 2013 is the first manmade object to have left our solar system. Now the womens career kept going. In 1980s they began working on the return to venus. They worked on return to jupiter. In 2013, i held a reunion of this group of women at the jet Propulsion Laboratory and it was such a remarkable experience to get to be in the lab with them and hear their memories first hand. I was surprised by how much their histories had been forgotten by nasa. One example is the story of sue finley. She was hired in 1958 by macy roberts before nasa was even officially formed. She still works there today. That title that sue worked to get in 1969 was taken away from her and she was demoted. Despite this, even though she first went to a school at the time when women werent generally allowed into most engineering schools, she does love her job. She works at jpl and doesnt have any plans to retire currently. I wanted to write a book to tell the histories of the women. They very much deserve it. But, also, hopefully to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. It we also see about half of all women in science, technology, engineering, and math end up leaving mid career. In addition to that, we see a real stagnating interest in s. T. E. M. Among High School Graduate women. So in red on top the male High School Graduates. Over the past two decades, you can see those levels have steadily been climbing and are now at about 45 . Fortunately theres a lot of groups working to change this. You have wonderful organizations such as girls who code and trying to get young women interested in computers and science early on. And you also have some universities that have made some significant changes. This is data from the college in california. In 2005, they found that about 15 of their bachelor degree in Computer Science were awarded to women. They decided to make a few changes. First, they changed their introductory Computer Science classes so anyone could get started. By making the changes what we see today is about half of their graduates in Computer Science are now women. We know there are changes we can make on an institutional level that can make a big difference. And thanks to helen and barbara and sue and this Incredible Group of pioneers in American Space flight that paved the way. This is my daughter. We named her eleanor francis. Shes named in part for a woman i never had a chance to meet. She passed away a year before i started my research. I hope her story and that of these other women will one day inspire my daughter, too. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for having me here. I appreciate it. [ applause ] well take some questions now. Right there. Go ahead. You focussed on jpl and ive never been there. By the way, uva was the last State University in the country to allow women you dont have to remind me. Right. But i have been to the same genderspecific rooms apply there . Yes. In huntsville there was a large group of female computers. They, too, had shorter careers because they ended up mostly losing their jobs after ibms came into the lab. Its incredible how many nasa centers there are across the country and what role we played in the missions. I cant believe it. Im stunned. Im stunned. Okay. Here we go. Pass this over, please. About half the women left their stem jobs. Where did they go . Well, many women that are leaving academia in the sciences will often find roles that are sort of outside what we normally think of in terms of science careers. So many will go into teaching and other roles like that. But, you know, im not sure that we really have a great idea of where theyre all going and how we can keep women into these fields. Why are they leaving . Its hard for me to answer that. I think theres many reasons why someone would leave mid career. Part may be there are family considerations. But it can be difficult being in academia. Im sure many of you know, especially its not always easy to balance roles. For many of these women living with the career, its a time when they do have young children. But im not really well versed enough in the research and im sure there are many people that are really looking into this. At least i hope so that are going into this and trying to look at the reasons why people leave in ways we can retain them. Are there any studies that have been done or being done as to why young women are not going into the s. T. E. M. Programs . Well, i think what is compelling is that data. Theyre not the only college to have done it. They use them as other examples. Theres other colleges that have taken a similar approach. We know there are concrete actions that can women bang into the majors that used to be more plentiful. I dont know any of that history. It sounds very interesting. Okay. Yeah. I personally think we should especially getting girls into s. T. E. M. Fields pretty much as soon as possible, like the younger the better. So how young would you suggest we start . Good question. Im certainly with you in spirit. Im not an educator so i dont know what the best age is. So i do know from giving talks at a lot of Elementary Schools and junior high schools that theres something just compelling about science. So i think even if were not trying to necessarily drive young girls or boys into science careers, theres value into getting young people excited about science at an early age. I have a daughter that got her undergraduate degree from uva in Aerospace Engineers and got her masters degree in aero space engineering from uva and works at boeing with satellites. And i was surprised at the number of women that actually work with her there. I know there are a lot of people in that field. Of course, we can get more women in any field. Theres a surprising amount of women that work at bowing with my daughter. One of the reasons why she became interested in Aerospace Engineering was star trek and star wars and her father was an engineer and we spent a lot of dinners watching star trek and talking about that. And so i think shows like that now that piques young peoples interest in space is really a catalyst. It must be a good point and you must be proud of your daughter. I have toured spacex and blue origin and some of the private place Flight Companies and ive been astounded by how many women i see. In some ways, their percentages are actually higher than what is at nasa of science and engineers today. Many of these companies are also kind of going on the Google Play Book of offering a lot to their employees. I guess thats a wonderful way to attract men and women and hopefully make it easier for young people to stay in the field. I have a ph. D. In molecular biology. I have to say, i dont know a woman in science who hasnt had some type of negative experience. I think it is just sort of par for the course and that probably could be said for most anyone who has entered graduate school, of course. But ive been fortune enough to work with wonderful advisors and wonderful faculty in my career. Ive felt fortunate for having those experiences. Especially for graduate school, i had a female advisor who felt passionate about supporting her students. It im an Aerospace Engineer and my husband is, too, and we raised our three children. We took them to Space Shuttle launches, we took them to science museums and all three turned out to be liberal arts majors. [ laughter ] but they are liberal arts majors with a good background in science and math. But it was i really appreciate you bringing that to my attention. I only worked for four years as an engineer in the army and stayed home to raise children and i teach math and science in middle school. Everybody has their own choices but stories like this can inspire people and show them what can happen. So thank you very much. Thank you. On the graph you displayed with the interest in the s. T. E. M. Field, i saw a stark drop in interest in both genders displayed around 2004. Do you know if there was a reason for that . Just people lost interest . Im not sure. I dont know what the reason might be. Its interesting. I mean, im curious what it could be. Im also familiar with the discrimination against women in engineering, specifically both of my parents went to Tufts University and graduated with degrees in engineering. My mother is a mechanical engineer and my father is a chemical engineer. My mother worked for lock heed when it was lockheed martin. At one point, probably 25 years ago, she was applying to jobs in the Mechanical Engineering field and she was told that there were two things wrong with her. Her age and her sex. Very interesting. This group of women is different than any other nasa sectors. They were colleagues with the men they worked with. We see that in their early publications. So even in the 1950s and 60s, there were actually including the female computers on their publications. And that was very, very rare. Hi. So i actually majored in Computer Science. I have two degrees in Computer Science. In 2004 it was difficult to get jobs at that time. It was right after 9 11. They werent hiring people like that. I dont know why but i think there may have been a bit of the softening of the economy. So that could be why. All right. Any more questions . So the Glass Ceiling is this a National Problem or an international . Does the soviet union during this time period have the same problem . In terms of getting women into space. If seems as if women may have had somewhat of a larger role in their space program. I dont know the answer. Its a good question. I remember sputnik as a little girl and our whole neighborhood was out there. Its amazing theyre flowing around up there sometimes printing things when they need on a 3d printer but theres very little public awareness. I think its a source of frustration. Im certain it must be for those working at nasa right now. Fortunately, you know, there are some projects such as mars rovers that i think will always garner perhaps a little more attention than they should. They are so exciting. Perhaps cocould linger around a little longer. Its amazing how were able to launch the spacecraft, even though there may not be anyone riding in them able to go off and take the beautiful pictures of jupiter and saturn and send them back to earth. All right. I hope youll come back. And, you know, before she goes back lets give her a thank you. [ applause ] raise your hand if you had heard of the gene harris murder trial before this class. Well talk about both sides of the story. Lectures in history on American History tv. And lectures in history is available as a pod cast. Find it where you listen to pod casts. Up next on American History tv. Joyce lee malcolm on Benedict Arnolds success in the revolutionary war. She questions whether allegations of him being an american traitor are accurate. This onehour talk is hosted by the university of washington as part of their great lives lecture series