Out of Place: Inappropriate, Unsuitable, and Rare

The topic for Week 3 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is “Out of Place.” I struggled with choosing someone in my family tree for this topic because my family has been “out of place,” constantly moving and trying new things for the past four generations in every line. Since out of place is normal, what is rare?

What is rare is everyone’s unique struggles in being considered unsuitable or inappropriate for the environment. The struggles I know best are mine.

What Do Want To Be When You Grow Up?

I never had an answer to that question. I liked puzzles, Legos, and Lincoln Logs, which were considered odd for a girl then. By High School, I knew I didn’t want to be a dentist. I had worked in my Dad’s dental office starting when I turned 14. I wouldn’t say I liked sticking my hands in people’s mouths.

I hated my accounting class, so that was out. I had been fascinated with going to space since the first Apollo landing, and one of my dad’s best friends was an aerospace engineer. He came over to help me decide. He asked me many questions about what I liked and didn’t like, what courses I did well in, and which ones I did poorly. In the end, he told me that he didn’t know what to do about my interest in French, but I was going to be an engineer. And he set me on my path to be out of place and excel.

Rare Female Student

Female engineers were rare because many colleges only started allowing female engineering students in 1977. But I didn’t understand that colleges that allowed women before then were so restrictive. At the University of Washington, each engineering department worked to limit the number of female students and the caliber of female students.

When I was a Freshman, a Senior engineering student took me under her wing. She was the only female in her degree program and had been told many times that she would only be allowed to stay in the program and graduate if she remained the top student. Also, she was told that no other females would be allowed into her degree program until she graduated because they didn’t want more than one woman in the program at a time.

Some of the other engineering degree programs allowed up to one woman each year in their program. But the engineering college required women to have much higher grades than their male counterparts. For the men, D was barely passing. For the women, a B- was failing. After coping with a serial killer, a stalker, and sexual harassment, in addition to the prejudice, I transferred to Seattle University, where I flourished and graduated.

NASA Calls

By law, NASA could only hire engineers with specific technical courses, degrees, and a GPA of 3.6 (A-). I graduated in December 1983, and in January 1984, Congress gave NASA authority to hire a few engineers. All of these engineers were required to be female. Bonus points were given to applicants that were also minorities.

I woke up one morning to a phone call from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Although I was not fully awake and still in my pajamas, I was interviewed and offered a job. When I got off the phone, it rang immediately, and I had an interview with job offers from Marshall Space Center in Alabama and Johnson Space Center in Texas. Lastly, I got a phone call from Ames Research Center in California. After more discussions with all of these NASA centers, I chose Johnson Space Center, and they immediately sent movers.

A Rare Job – Making Spaceships Fly

I ended up in exactly the right place and time to have an extraordinary career, but the prejudice against women and minorities was unbelievable, illogical, and sometimes just plain stupid. I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering which included hardware and a little of that brand-new field in engineering that eventually became named “software.”

There was excitement when NASA received word that they could hire engineers again after a twenty-year wait. But the managers’ excitement quickly changed to unhappiness and shock when they learned that only females could be hired.

My boss was an unusually forward-thinking man. When he heard all the grumbling, he decided to try to hire as many women as possible. He got three out of the 10 or 12 hires allotted to Johnson Space Center. One woman had years of experience, and the other two had just graduated.

Our job was to make spaceships fly in the virtual world. One simulator had the full skeleton of the Space Shuttle, all the same wiring and electronics, and the same flight computers as the real shuttles. We provided the rest of the environment – payloads, gravity, power, propulsion, cockpits, and window views.

The other simulator was for spaceships that hadn’t been built yet in the real world. I worked on three different capsule-shaped vehicles before Orion, and I can’t remember how many different space station configurations I worked on.

My boss was determined not to lose his new employees and went on a campaign to try to eliminate as much hostility against us as possible. Every night he would go through all the offices and laboratories in our building and remove all offensive calendars and posters. After a year or so, the offensive material just stopped showing up. He also assigned us to work that he believed would allow us to use our natural strengths and succeed where other, more experienced engineers had failed.

Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures was a non-fiction book about NASA in 1961. In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures came out and showed the struggles of the black women who were called “computers’. In a few scenes, a woman was shown running long distances in heels to get to a restroom for black women. Before I had seen the movie, my mother called and asked if that was real.

Was the actual path she ran true? I don’t know. I have only been to Langley Research Center once and wasn’t there long enough to assess the women’s bathrooms. But was the running true? – absolutely.

In 1983, women’s bathrooms were still scarce at the more “modern” Johnson Space Center. They did not exist in every building. But at least they were no longer marked black or white, so all women had access to all the restrooms.

There were four small women’s restrooms on one half of the huge two-story building where I worked. Most of my work took place on the side without women’s restrooms. So I had a 10-15 minute jog to get to a restroom, wait for an open stall, and then a 10-15 minute jog back. In one lab, there was a half door about 3 feet above the floor leading up to the plumbing corridors, and if I climbed up that way, I could shave 5-10 minutes off my jog. Men’s restrooms were in every nook and corner of all the buildings.

Other Not-So-Rare Stuff

Illogic

Did you know that engineers can’t get pregnant?

Neither did I, but that was a commonly held belief until two engineers showed them otherwise.

Logic statements typically take the form of:

If A is true and B is true, then A+B is true.

Find the error in the logic statement!

If (all engineers are men) and (men can’t get pregnant) then (engineers can’t get pregnant)

Inappropriate Behavior

Two college interns reported inappropriate behavior from a senior scientist to their boss, a rare female supervisor. At a mandatory class on sexual harassment, the supervisor asked the teacher how she should deal with the interns. A Human Resources Representative escorted the supervisor out of the class.

The teacher told the rest of the class that the supervisor could be in serious legal trouble because the interns officially notified her about inappropriate behavior by a male employee, and she did not report it or take action to stop it. The supervisor believed that her employee was an old man with old ideas of what was appropriate, and it was the young women who needed to accept his behavior.

Plain Old Prejudice

We had old rotary dial phones with multiple lines, but only one phone per room of six people. Whoever was in the office would answer the phone and leave a note about the call on the appropriate desk.

My boss told us that he had gotten several phone calls from the Director of Engineering complaining about the terrible secretaries in our office who never knew where the rest of the people in the office were.

We had three astronauts and three engineers in our office – no secretaries. No matter how often our boss told the Director that we were engineers or astronauts who had no reason to know where the others were, the Director didn’t believe him.

Female voices had to be secretaries.