Civil Rights Movement: Paving The Way For Women

Paving the Way for Women

The 1960s were a time of change, not only in space advancements, but also in social views. The most notable change was the Civil Rights Movement, the fight for equal rights for African Americans. In the heart of NASA, there was a smaller change, but just as important. During the space race, NASA started letting women work with men to contribute to advancements in technology astronauts into space. Women's advancements at NASA helped pave the way for women to succeed in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) jobs today.

There have been many women at NASA who helped make breakthroughs in space. For example, into a NASA research center called Langley, African American women worked as human computers (people

She was a mathematician who also worked at Langley alongside Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackosn until she was moved to the Flight Research Division. One of her most famous works was the Mercury 7 mission, sending John Glenn into space. She checked IMB computers calculations by hand to confirm that the landing points were correct. Yet Johnson says her greatest achievement is writing over twenty-six research reports on space shuttles and on the Earth Resources Satellite. Her researched reports helped engineers find the calculations to successfully land a space shuttle; she was also the first African American woman to be named on a report as a co-author (Loff). When NASA accepted Katherine Johnson's job application, they allowed her, and other women, to prove that they could do the same work as men and be able to fulfill their

Because doing so could finally yield them good paying jobs, women started to get college degrees. In 1962, the year Mercury Seven launched into space, 11.4% of men in the United States had college degrees while only 6.7% of the women had college degrees. But as of 2015, 34.6% of the female population has college degrees compared to only 33.7% of men with college degrees (Noonan). Since the space race, the number of women with college degrees has increased exponentially, and NASA helped sparked that movement.

Today, more women have college degrees because when NASA allowed women to work in the space race, society started seeing it as normal for women to be more than a teacher or a stay-at-home-mom. Now, women can become almost anything they want, and no one bats an eye. This is because in the mid-to late-1900s women had to fight and prove that they could work in those jobs. Women had to work harder and longer than men to get the same pay and recognition. But eventually they did, and equality in the workplace is more common and more welcomed than ever