Female engineer at cape canaveral. what was it like when you first started at nasa? it was pretty intense. it was all men. a lot of the buildings i worked in didn t have ladies rest rooms. reporter: just like the women in the movie hidden figures, joann had to go to a different building or use the men s room. sometimes during tests, the guard was just great. he would come over and say, you need a little break? i ll police the men s room. reporter: when joann first started working in the firing room, she also got some obscene phone calls. one time when one of them came through, i slammed the phone down and one of the division operators from the station downstairs came up and he said, is something wrong? is something wrong? i said, yeah. an obscene phone call. but i never let myself feel like an object. i was not going to be an object, you know.