Aaron Gustafson's Blog, page 6

Lucy Hicks Anderson was an early black trans pioneer

While the term transgender is a recent development, trans people have always been with us. In the white supremacist system that dominates the United States and has declared cit-het people ���normal��� (and everyone else ���abnormal���), being trans has never been easy, but it���s been especially dangerous for black trans women. Knowing this, I am awestruck by the bravery of Lucy Hicks Anderson, a black trans woman born in Kentucky in 1886, who became a renown socialite and hostess in 1940s California.

As I mentioned, Lucy Hicks Anderson was born in 1886. Born ���Tobias Lawson,��� she was assigned male at birth. She was adamant that she was a girl from a very early age and insisted on wearing dresses and being called Lucy when she started school. Her mother took her to a physician and he supported Lucy���s parents in raising her as a young woman.

Lucy left school at 15 and worked as a domestic servant. In doing so, she raised enough money to move West. First to Texas, then New Mexico. She met her first husband, Clarence Hicks, in New Mexico and the two later relocated to Oxnard, California where Lucy gained some notoriety as a chef. By the time her marriage ended, Lucy had saved up enough money to purchase a boarding house/brothel that also sold liquor during the height of prohibition. In 1944, Lucy married a soldier named Rueben Anderson.

A year later, another soldier claimed to have caught an STD from Lucy���s brothel, a claim which prompted all of the women in the brothel���including Lucy���to be tested for disease. When the district attorney for Ventura County learned���during the course of the exam���that Lucy had been assigned male at birth, he tried her for perjury, saying she���d lied about being a woman on her marriage license. The jury convicted Lucy of perjury, despite her challenge: ���I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman ��� I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.���

The judge placed her on probation for ten years rather than send her to prison, but her marriage was declared invalid. This triggered the federal government to charge her (and Rueben) with fraud for receiving financial allotments granted to the wives of soldiers under the GI Bill and with failing to register for the draft. She and her husband were both sentenced to prison and Lucy was not allowed to wear women���s clothes.

When the couple was released from prison, the Oxnard sheriff barred them from returning and they decided to move to Los Angeles to live out their remaining years. Lucy died in 1954.

I cannot help but admire Lucy���s resilience through all of this. She knew who she was and stood up for herself, speaking truth to power despite the danger inherent in doing so.

Maya Angelou persevered, but many don���t

There are so many reasons to love and admire Maya Angelou. Most of these stem from her novels, poetry, and civil rights work, but I���m going to pick an unusual one: she was determined to be the first black woman to conduct a cable car in San Francisco. And she succeeded at 16.

In an interview with Oprah in 2013, Angelou recalled ���I saw women on the street cars with their little changer belts. They had caps with bibs on them and form-fitting jackets. I loved their uniforms. I said that is the job I want.���

Her mom, Vivian Baxter, encouraged her to apply, but Market Street Railway Company refused to let her. When her mom asked her if she knew why ���I said, ���Yes, because I���m a Negro.������

Her mom knew how much she wanted the job and told her to ���go get it,��� advising her to ���Go down everyday and be there before the secretaries get there and read your big Russian books��� (she was reading Dostoevsky). ���And sit there until they leave.��� After sitting there for two weeks, Angelou���s ambition and determination finally paid off and she was invited to apply and got the job.

While this is an interesting tidbit from Angelou���s life���which has been chronicled in several of her books, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Mom & Me & Mom���it still resonates today. Here we are, 76 years later, and black people���especially black women���are still disadvantaged when it comes to applying for jobs.

Angelou���s perseverance in the face of bigotry is laudable, but it���s incredibly sad that she and so many others have needed to go to such lengths just to get their feet in the door. We must work to change this.

And so I urge you to get involved in your company���s hiring (and promotion) process. Agitate for change. Eliminate bias. Expand the pool of talent to which you advertise positions. Make sure interview loops are diverse. Fight for the advancement of underrepresented colleagues. Take an active role in dismantling the systems of white supremacy (and misogyny) that continue to deny access (and advancement) to so many amazing people.

Jerry Lawson made home video game systems possible

One of my fondest childhood memories was getting a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday. It wasn���t the expensive set with the robot and the gun (we were poor), but my mom somehow managed to scrape together the $199 (over $470 in today���s dollars) for the system. It opened up a whole new world for me.

I only recently discovered that this fixture of my childhood was made possible by a black engineer named Jerry Lawson.

Jerry Lawson was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, NY to a longshoreman and a municipal employee. Both of his parents were interested in science and his grandfather was educated as a physicist���though he struggled to build a career in physics (ahem, white supremacy) and ended up becoming a postmaster. Suffice to say, his family valued education and encouraged him to pursue scientific hobbies. At 13, he was a licensed amateur ham radio operator who build a radio station in his bedroom. In high school he repaired TVs for money.

Lawson never earned a degree, but he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in 1970 as an applications engineering consultant. While working there, he built a game called Demolition Derby in his garage. That game was one of the earliest microprocessor-driven games, using Fairchild���s F8 microprocessor. It put him on the map at Fairchild and he was promoted to Chief Hardware Engineer in the mid-���70s. He also became the director of engineering and marketing for their video game division.

In this new role, Lawson led the development of the Fairchild Channel F, the first system to feature interchangeable game cartridges that enabled a single system to play multiple titles. Prior to that, a game���s ROM had been soldered to the game hardware. This move was a game changer (pardon the pun) for the burgeoning industry, creating a whole new revenue stream for console manufacturers. While the Channel F didn���t achieve much commercial success, its novel approach to game integration was quickly copied by the Atari 2600, released in 1977. And the rest, as they say, is history.

It���s also worth noting that Lawson was one of only two members of the influential Homebrew Computer Club (alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak). According to Lawson, he even interviewed ���Woz��� for a position at Fairchild, but declined to hire him.

Lawson died of complications from diabetes in 2011, just one month after being recognized by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) for his role in the development of the cartridge-based game console.

You can read more about Jerry Lawson on the Vintage Computing & Gaming blog.

Apply for a spot in my 2020���21 mentorship cohort

It���s hard to believe how quickly the last year has gone. It has been a tremendous honor to work with Ace, Dezzie, Marcy, Olu, and Sara for these past 12 months. And while we wrap up our mentorship calls this month, I thought it would be a good idea to open up the application for my 2020���21 cohort.

I was totally overwhelmed by the response when I opened up applications last year, so I���m going to try to be a bit more organized this year by having a more formal application process using a web form. This will help me reduce the amount of manual work I have to do to review all of the applications.

If you���re interested, I encourage you to read the parameters of the mentorship below and then you can click over to the form and apply.

What am I looking for in a mentee?

Whether you aspire to work on the web or you���re a veteran of the browser wars, if you think you could benefit from mentorship, I���d like to help. My ideal mentee is someone who���s passionate about the web and is���perhaps most of all���someone who I believe I can help.

To that end, my skills and knowledge will probably be most helpful to people interested in any or all of the these:

writing/speaking;
growing your allyship skills;
building a professional practice centered around performance, progressive enhancement, user experience, accessibility, etc.; and/or
growing in their career.

I���m into a lot of things, but those are probably the ones I���m most confident I can help with.

You don���t need to live near me or even in the same hemisphere. If you happen to be in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. or live somewhere that I���m traveling to over the next year, I���d love to meet you in person, but that���s by no means a requirement. I���m based in the Pacific time zone (Seattle, Washington), but I���ll do my best to coordinate a regular time for us to chat that won���t require you hopping on Skype at two in the morning (unless that���s your thing). Email��� Skype��� Hangouts��� I���m happy to work however you���re comfortable.

I���m afraid I don���t speak any languages other than English, so that artificially restricts the pool of folks I can work with, but don���t worry if you don���t think your English is great. Honestly, it���s probably better than you give yourself credit for. It���s also 100% guaranteed to be better than my attempts at speaking pretty much any language other than English.

Who should apply?

Much of my work over the past twenty-plus years has been concentrated in the areas of accessibility and, more broadly, inclusive design. To create a web that can go anywhere and work for anyone, we need a diverse group of people making it happen. Sadly, our industry has a difficult time recruiting, developing, and (most importantly) retaining a diverse workforce. Given the egalitarian ideals that the web was founded on, that���s a travesty.

I want to see more diverse faces working on the web, speaking at conferences, writing articles, and getting promoted into leadership positions in design, UX, and development. I am only considering applications from folks who self-identify as part of an underrepresented group. Out of respect for your privacy, I���m not requiring that you label yourself in any particular way, but I do ask that you check your privilege and refrain from applying if you���re part of a group that is already heavily represented in our industry (such as white or asian cis het males).

What can you expect?

This mentorship will last for a full year. You���ll have the option of talking to me for an hour a month, either all at once or in two 30-minute blocks. You���ll also be invited into my mentorship Slack group, where you���ll be able to chat with me async or in real-time (depending on where you live), chat with other folks in your cohort (and my past mentees), and share your work.

Can you nominate someone?

If you know someone who you think would be a good fit for this, please nominate them! All I ask is that you introduce us with some context. The easiest (but most public) way is to @-message us both on Twitter. If you���d rather keep it private, you can kick off a DM thread with us if your nominee is on Twitter too (my DMs are open). You could also start the conversation by dropping me a note through the contact form on this site or sending me a message on any of the various platforms I frequent (Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on).

I look forward to working with you (or your friend)!

The application for my 2020���21 mentorship cohort is open through the end of February in any timezone (I���m not a stickler, but the form will close automatically on March 1st). I met a ton of amazing folks last year through this process and got to work with two outstanding human beings. I look forward to getting to know you and taking a few of you under my wing.

I���m Running for the W3C Advisory Board

As many of you know, I���ve been involved in the push for web standards for the better part of two decades. I caught the bug early and have been advocating for their use in pretty much every article, book, talk, and workshop I���ve created. I���ve also had the great pleasure of helping run the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a group whose impact on the web cannot be understated.1 And so, when a handful of my colleagues reached out to see if I���d consider running for the W3C Advisory Board, I was��� well��� speechless. What an honor it is to be nominated, especially out of the blue like that!

You can read my nomination statement on the W3C site, so I won���t spend a lot of time rehashing that. What I will do is make a brief case for why I think I would be a valuable member of this particular board.

I���m a web developer whose heart belongs to standards. I may work for Microsoft in Developer Relations, but I started building stuff for the web in 1996 and never stopped. I���ve worked on sites for every kind of business you can imagine���from small mom and pop shops to huge international conglomerates and everything in between. I���ve also held just about every role you can in web projects, from strategist right through to front and back end dev, where the rubber meets the road.

I think this experience, especially when coupled with my current position at Microsoft���which affords me a lot of time to listen to the challenges faced by the web design and development community���will enable me to bring an ���in the trenches��� perspective to the W3C. Rachel Andrew provides similar guidance as Fronteers��� representative to the W3C and I relish the opportunity to work with her again2 in this capacity. I honestly wish there were more web designers and developers working within the W3C and my goal is to give voice to their concerns and champion their ideas.

I���m a diplomat and a pragmatist. Over the years, I���ve participated in varying capacities for a handful of boards and committees. I���ve chaired small town committees (e.g., the Energy Use Task Force in Hamden, Connecticut), been the co-president of a state political party (Green Party of Connecticut), run homeowners associations, and, of course, led the Web Standards Project, to name but a few. In all of these roles���and in my consulting work���I���ve learned how to manage personalities (and politics), set expectations, and get folks to rally together to achieve common goals.

Anyone who knows me will tell you I am incredibly diplomatic. Perhaps more soo than is warranted sometimes. I believe everyone should be heard, but I���m also unwilling to allow individuals to dominate conversations and drown out other viewpoints. I value diverse opinions and appreciate people who challenge convention. In all interactions, I look for common ground and shared goals. I don���t shy away from uncomfortable conversations and have no problem disagreeing with someone, but I will always do it in a civil and respectful way.

While idealistic���especially when it comes to the web and standards���I���m also a pragmatist. I want to understand problems from multiple angles and use that knowledge to know which battles are worth fighting and when compromise is necessary. And I always seek to build consensus, which is the W3C way.

I���ve got experience in non-profit work. You may not realize it, but the W3C does not actually exist as a legal entity. It���s currently in the process of changing that and becoming a non-profit corporation. The Advisory Board is overseeing that process. When I lived in Connecticut, I helped form a non-profit corporation. I���ve also got experience in grant writing and other non-profit related work. I think I could be a real asset in that regard.

If you can vote in this election and think I���d make a good member of the Advisory Board, please vote for me. If you can���t vote, but know someone who can, please encourage them to read this and consider voting for me. I���d be ever so grateful for your help.

Thank you!

Most of the truly impressive and important work was done by the folks who founded the Web Standards Project. I can���t take credit for more than a handful of our activities, but I was honored to have played a bit role in its history.��↩

We worked together in the Web Standard Project.��↩

My own, personal, PWA

Progressive Web Apps are often something we think of as building for others, but while I was redoing the Service Worker implementation on this site���to improve performance for you, dear reader���I decided to throw in a little goody for me as well, in the form of the Share Target.

Early last year, Tim Kadlec shared his bookmarklet for saving links to his site. I thought it was a brilliant setup, especially for a static site:

The bookmarklet captures the URL, page title, and any selection you���ve made and pipes it over to a form on your site;
The form contains the code that will generate a new static file in you site���s GitHub repo.

Smartly, the form requires you to log in with your GitHub credentials. That keeps it from being abused by others. Sadly, I always struggled to get this setup working fluidly on mobile. With the introduction of the Share Target, it���s become a lot easier.

You define a Share Target in your Web App Manifest. The original design only allowed for links and text to be shared, but version 2 is coming soon with support for any file type.1 Pretty cool stuff! As you���d expect, the key is share_target and it takes a JSON object that looks a lot like a form configuration:

"share_target": {
"action": "linky/poo/",
"method": "GET",
"enctype": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
"params": {
"title": "title",
"text": "body",
"url": "url"
}
}

The first key is the action page. In this case, it points at my link posting form. I want the shared data passed via the query string, so I���m using GET as the method (but you could use other HTTP request methods as well). I set the encoding (enctype) and then identify the parameters I want to send and what they should be called in the payload.

With this in place, I installed my site on my phone and could immediately share links directly to it:

This screenshot shows my PWA as a share target available within Android.

On the receiving end, everything works pretty well. Android doesn���t support sharing selected text along with the title of the page and the URL (like Tim���s bookmarklet does), but I can always copy the text I want to quote before I share the page. Another oddity in Android is that it currently sends the URL over as the body for some strange reason, but I set the JavaScript up on the resulting page to enable me to look for a URL in that field and pop it into the right spot. That way, when Android fixes the issue, it won���t cause any issues with a true text body (like your text selection���hint, hint).

Another nice enhancement I added to the form was autocomplete for the tag field. Using a datalist element, I have all of my site���s tags ready to autocomplete that field. Unfortunately, autocomplete doesn���t work great for multiple items out of the box, so I got some inspiration from this StackOverflow solution and implemented a vanilla JavaScript multiple choice datalist-driven input. Sweet!

While we often think of PWAs as being something we build for others, I���m totally stoked that I can also add PWA functionality that���s just for me (or, more broadly, internally-focused). That���s pretty exciting and demonstrates just how powerful and adaptable PWAs are.

Incidentally, the Share Target implementation for Universal Windows Apps has supported file type association for a long time now, which is why the Windows Store version of Twitter (which is a PWA) can receive images, videos, and more, right from the File Manager.��↩

Introducing my 2019 mentees

Late last year, I opened applications for my 2019 mentorship cohort.. To say I was overwhelmed by the response is a drastic understatement. I got so many awesome applications, that I decided to increase the slots from two to five! In the end, I���m really excited about the folks I���ll be working with this year: Adewale Abati, Olu Niyi-Awosusi, Marcy Sutton, Sara Wegman, and Desir��e Zamora Garc��a.

I���ve been working with all five of them for a few months now and wanted to highlight a bit about who they are and what we are working on.

Adewale Abati

Adewale ���Ace��� Abati hails from Lagos, Nigeria. He and I connected after I presented at Concatenate last year. He���s eager to write, speak, learn, and share, especially when it comes to accessibility. I love the passion and enthusiasm I���m seeing from the dev community in Nigeria right now and Ace is a pure distillation of that.

Over the course of the next year, we���ll be working on his technical skills (especially accessibility), his technical writing, and his speaking skills. Ace has a lot of energy and I���m excited to be along for the ride.

Follow Ace and check out his work


Twitter: @Ace_KYD
Blog: acekyd.com
LinkedIn: @acekyd
Github: @acekyd


Olu Niyi-Awosusi

Olu is based in London, works for the BBC, and is a champion for accessibility. I love their passion for the web and that they share a ton of what they learn. So far, we���ve focused much of our time discussing diversity & inclusion and their importance in building the web we want. Olu is focused on improving their JavaScript and accessibility chops and is looking to become a better speaker (they are already a great writer). If you���re looking for a really awesome talk on the intersection of accessibility and social justice, hit them up!

Follow Olu and check out their work


Twitter: @oluoluoxenfree
Blog: opentagclosetag.com
LinkedIn: @oluniyiawosusi
Github: @oluoluoxenfree


Marcy Sutton

I was so honored when Marcy Sutton reached out to me and asked me to mentor her. I have a ridiculous amount of respect for Marcy and have learned a ton from her over the years. How could I say no��� Marcy and I will be spending the bulk of our time discussing work/life balance and career advancement. She���s actually based about an hour north of me too, which means we can get together in person every now & then. Bonus!

Follow Marcy and check out her work


Twitter: @marcysutton
Blog: marcysutton.com
LinkedIn: @marcysutton
Github: @marcysutton


Sara Wegman

I have to admit I fell in love with Sara���s writing immediately. She���s got a way with words and a sincere kindness that just pours from every project she works on. I use her new tab page in Chrome to give me a little pick-me-up several times a day. Together, we���ll be working on career development, leveling up her dev skills, and looking for opportunities for her to share her knowledge. In the short time we���ve been working together, she���s demonstrated incredible commitment, tenacity, and talent. I even brought her onto the editorial team at A List Apart, where she���s already jumped in and proven herself a valuable contributor to that esteemed publication.

Follow Sara and check out her work


Twitter: @SaraLaughed
Blog: blog.sarawegman.com
LinkedIn: @saralaughed


Desir��e Zamora Garc��a

I���ve the great pleasure of working with Dezzie for a while now on A List Apart. She���s incredible���both as a writer and an editor. She���s got strong, well-grounded opinions and knows how to articulate them. She���s also supremely talented when it comes to UX and design, which is unsurprising given her career path thus far. We���re spending our time talking about her career (and our kids).

Follow Dezzie and check out her work


Twitter: @thedezzie
Blog: dezz.ie
LinkedIn: @thedezzie

Angie Turner King invested her energy in others

Chances are you���ve never heard the name Angie Turner King, and that���s because, like so many black women, she invested her time and energy in other people. In King���s case, students.

Born in 1905 in West Virginia coal country, Angie Turner King was the granddaughter of slaves. She lost her parents when she was young and went to live with a light-skinned grandmother who verbally abused and degraded her because of her dark skin. She later moved in with her grandfather who, while illiterate himself, insisted she go to school. She graduated form high school in 1919 at the age of 14.

Not knowing anything about scholarships, King cited tables and did other odd jobs to afford college. She graduated cum laude from West Virginia State in 1927 with a degree in mathematics and chemistry. After graduating, she began teaching, which was one of the few career options for women���especially women of color���in STEM at the time. While teaching high school, she enrolled in Cornell University and worked toward her Masters Degree, which she earned in 1931, over the summers.

After Cornell, she accepted a position at West Virginia State College, teaching at the laboratory school. She focused on getting the labs in shape ���so students would know what a real laboratory looks like.��� During World War II, she taught chemistry to soldiers as part of the Army Specialized Training Program at the college.

King went on to earn her PhD, even after getting married and birthing five daughters. She continued teaching and mentoring young minds. One of those minds was Katherine Johnson, the NASA scientist who cited her as a major influence: ���a wonderful teacher ��� bright, caring, and very rigorous.��� Another was entomologist and civil rights advocate Margaret Collins

To the best of our knowledge, Angie Turner King only every published two works (her dissertations). She didn���t invent some groundbreaking technology we can���t live without. She didn���t cure a horrible disease. She didn���t do one specific thing we should recognize her for. She did many things. She taught. She mentored. She nurtured. She put her energy into her students and gave them the tools they needed to be successful. She put others before herself and that���s damn admirable.

For this reason, I think Angie Turner King is the perfect person on whom to close out this series. So many incredibly important figures have been wiped from history by people who find them threatening. We need to share their stories. And even more never stepped into the limelight (or searchlight) to begin with. We need to discover them and share them too. We need to acknowledge and thank them enough for their activism, their sacrifice, and their commitment to improving this world of ours. We need to remember their names.

Margaret Collins used biology to push for equality

Unless you���re really into bugs, the name Margaret S. Collins may not mean that much to you. She was an entomologist who specialized in the study of termites, publishing prolifically throughout her career. She wasn���t just the ���Termite Lady,��� though, she was also an advocate for civil rights who pushed for equality through scientific investigation, risking both her life and freedom.

Collins was born in 1922 in West Virginia. She was always into bugs and collected them in the woods near her childhood home. At six, she was recognized as a prodigy and was granted access to West Virginia State University���s book collections. She used this opportunity to propel herself forward educationally, skipping two grades and graduating high school at 14. She obtained a Bachelor of Science in biology in 1943 and completed her PhD in Zoology seven years later (at age 28) with a dissertation on termites. At graduation, she became the first female entomologist of color.

After doing a stint as an assistant professor at Howard University, she left because of the inequality she saw between how male and female faculty members were treated. She relocated to Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, Florida. In 1953, she became chair of the Biology department.

In the early 1950s, while the civil rights struggles were really beginning to coalesce, Collins realized she could not sit idly by. She began to look for ways to do her part for the cause.

When invited to speak at a predominantly white university nearby, she decided to speak about biology and its implications when it came to discussions of equality. When word got out, someone phoned in a bomb threat and the university canceled her talk.1

In 1956, when the president of the Florida A & M Student Council called for a bus boycott in Tallahassee, she volunteered to drive people back and forth to work. When the protest organization got a tip that police and the FBI were going to raid their offices, Collins volunteered to transport the records containing sensitive information like the protestors��� names and addresses to safety. During this time, she recalled being routinely followed by both police and the FBI.

During the period from 1952���1957, Collins didn���t publish a single paper. In the years prior and subsequent to this period, she published at least two. That gives you some idea of how much of a focus her civil rights work had become.She recalled ���A lot of people opposed our civil rights efforts. I had to do what I thought was the most important thing. That���s all there was to it.���

In 1958, she returned to field work with termites, which was her greatest passion. She continued her research and field work right up until her death in 1996 while researching termites in the Cayman Islands.

What I truly appreciate about Margaret Collins is her focus and drive. She saw work that needed to be done and she stepped up and did it. Even when it terrified her.

It���s worth noting that the bomb threat didn���t stop her from discussing this topic. And she even led an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium entitled ���Science and the Question of Human Equality��� in 1979. It was turned into a book that was published in 1981.��↩

Katherine Johnson took us to the moon (and back)

As I���ve mentioned previously, I���ve wasn���t all that into space growing up. That said, I remember going to the Kennedy Space Center and watching movies and TV shows about our journeys into space. And I vividly recall the participants being depicted as white men. All of them. But that���s not accurate; there was an entire corps of women who did complex math to make flight (including space flight) possible and safe. And among those women, there was a group of black women who did this work too. Katherine Johnson was chief among them.

If you���ve read the book or seen the movie Hidden Figures, you no doubt know who Katherine Johnson is, but I want to share some interesting pieces of her story.

First off, Johnson was born in 1918. Growing up, she showed an incredible gift for mathematics, but she couldn���t attend public school past eighth grade in her West Virginian county because she was black and, well, racism. So her parents arranged for her to attend high school on the campus of West Virginia State College (now University). She enrolled at 10!

At 14(!) she graduated high school and enrolled at West Virginia State. She took every math class she could, and when she ran out of those, one of her professors, W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, created new classes for her to take. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937���at the age of 18���with degrees in math and French.

Two years later, Katherine Johnson began graduate studies at West Virginia University, becoming the first woman of color to attend the graduate program at the university. In fact, she was one of only three African-American students (and the only woman) selected to integrate the graduate school after Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. She left a year later, after becoming pregnant, to focus on her family.

Think about how few people of color (let alone women of color) you see in STEM careers today. Now turn the clock back 80 years and you start to get a sense of how hard it was for Katherine Johnson to find any work in mathematics that weren���t teaching positions. However, as luck would have it, she learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA) was hiring mathematicians. She applied and was hired into the Guidance and Navigation Department of NACA, which had a relatively progressive (by today���s standards) hiring policy.

NACA had a growing pool of women���including black women���who were ���computers��� that would read data from aircraft black boxes and execute precise mathematical calculations. Despite the progressive hiring policy, NACA segregated its employees and the black women were restricted to their own office and had to eat in their own dining room and use their own toilets. Still, Johnson���s mind and assertiveness enabled her to become part of the previously all-male flight research teams and higher level meetings where there wasn���t a woman in sight. She was matter-of-fact in her assertiveness too, simply telling people she had done the work and she belonged there.

When NACA became NASA, the segregated work environment went away, but discrimination was still pervasive, especially when it came to gender. Johnson recalled:

We needed to be assertive as women in those days ��� assertive and aggressive ��� and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports ��� no woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with Ted Skopinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston ��� but Henry Pearson, our supervisor ��� he was not a fan of women ��� kept pushing him to finish the report we were working on. Finally, Ted told him, ���Katherine should finish the report, she���s done most of the work anyway.��� So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something.

At NASA, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shephard���s 1961 space flight. When NASA used computers to calculate John Glenn���s orbit around Earth���the first time they���d used electronic ones rather than human ones���they asked Johnson to verify the result. Glenn apparently refused to go up without her help. In the book Hidden Figures, author Margot Lee Shetterly, also a black woman, nails the irony:

So the astronaut who became a hero, looked to this black woman in the still-segregated South at the time as one of the key parts of making sure his mission would be a success.

In addition to verifying their calculations, Johnson worked with computers too. In fact, in many ways she helped build confidence in the burgeoning technology. She calculated Apollo 11���s trajectory to the Moon and it was her work on backup procedures that helped make it possible for Apollo 13 to return safely to Earth.

I can���t even begin to comprehend the brilliance of Katherine Johnson���s mind. And I am in awe of her, but not just for that��� for her perseverance. We are only just starting to recognize, as a society, how much we stand to gain when we work in a diverse and inclusive environment. Imagine how much we might have missed out on had she not been assertive, had she not believed in herself. Her story is yet another in a long line of stories that prove how important it is to give people the opportunity to do their best work. And how important it is to believe in them and encourage them to believe in themselves.