Rise Of The Rocket Girls: The Stereotypes Of Women

NIchelle Nichols, a former NASA ambassador, once said, “Science is not a boy’s game or a girl’s game. It’s everyone’s game. It’s about where we are and where we are going”. Since the beginning of time, women were always seen as the ones who stay home, clean, and raise the kids. With this stereotype, women, both 30 years ago and 100, found it difficult to find good steady jobs, especially in science and math careers. Back in the 1950’s, engineers and scientists were seen as men and not women. Although many women pursued this path, it seemed near impossible to succeed due to the societal barriers one would have to overcome. Nathalia Holt author of Rise of the Rocket Girls: the women who propelled us, from missiles to the moon to mars, perfectly

From time to time, women were always sent to raise the children , stay home, and take care of the family. This idea still carried on until the late 20th century. Women would often not be hired for a job because an employer feared that they would soon quit and start a family. This was the same case at JPL too. Women would become pregnant and then would either quit or be fired and then never come back. Up until Helen Ling and Barbara Paulson, being a mother and an engineer seemed impossible at JPL. Barbara, a woman who loved her job and what she did to explore space, was devastated to leave and planned to return following giving birth to her first child. However, when requesting a new parking spot to be closer, she was immediately fired because the company “couldn’t possibly have a pregnant woman working for them”. In a time before maternity leave, it was claimed that only 25% of mothers with children under the age of 18 worked. Lucky for the women at JPL, they started to gain more equality at the company. Specifically, when the computers were officially re-named engineers at JPL, a huge step for the women there. In an interview of the author of the new book Hidden Figures, which is very similar to Rise of the Rocket Girls, said, “They had a lot of different identities in addition to being a professional mathematician at NASA. They were wives. They were mothers”. The same went for the women working at JPL. Despite the societal norm of being a “stay at home mom”, the mathematicians and computers broke boundaries and continued their influential