SHELBURNE — “Hidden Figures” is one of astronaut Catherine “Cady” Coleman’s favorite movies about NASA and its early years: vying with the Soviets to be the first to launch a man in space, while a group of African-American women — “Hidden Figures” — worked behind the scenes, helping with mathematical computations in the days just before the arrival of the IBM computers.
“From what I understand, there wasn’t any effort to deliberately hide these wonderful women,” Coleman, a Shelburne resident, told a group that had just watched the movie at the Senior Center of Shelburne Falls. “I think it really does apply to today, when you think about who (in today’s society) you are not seeing.”
The movie is about three black women at NASA, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who were behind the scenes and integral to the first launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit.
The women started their NASA careers in the segregated South, sometimes running to the few “colored” restrooms on a sprawling NASA campus in their dress code-required dresses and high heels, and fielding assumptions that they weren’t as bright as they really were.
“It’s definitely a very true story that John Glenn wouldn’t go up in that space capsule until Katherine Johnson reviewed the data,” Coleman said.
Coleman said she could relate to the searches for the “colored” bathrooms, because there were fewer women’s bathrooms than there were men’s rooms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she attended undergrad. For this reason, women starting at the school always got a tour of where all the women’s bathrooms were, she recalled.
She found a similar experience in Russia, from where she left in a Soyuz shuttle to spend six months in the International Space Station. The cosmonaut office’s women’s restroom was at the other end of the building, so Coleman used the male cosmonauts restroom before suiting up.
Coleman said she identified with scenes in the movie in which the black women in their dresses stood out against a sea of white men in white dress shirts and skinny ties.
She recalled a time when she and the male astronauts from her crew were to meet President Barack Obama at the White House. She didn’t know what to wear. She said she wore a bright green top, while all the men — the president included — were wearing dark suits.
She shows that photo to schoolchildren when she visits schools.
“When I was in third grade, we didn’t know I was going to be in this picture at the Whitehouse, and I would need to know what to wear,” she said.
When asked if women working at NASA have to “prove” themselves by being better than men to get the same jobs they get, Coleman said, “I think that’s still true. There’s lots of examples of how things are different, but there’s still some examples of unconscious bias,” said Coleman, who was with NASA for 24 years.
She said movies like “Hidden Figures” help to make people aware of their biases.
Coleman said the good thing about working at NASA is that you have a mission, and that you work with those around you as a team.
“We have a luxury of working at this job where the mission is so much more important than whether we like each other, whether we decide to go into space together, whether we wish we were home, whether we wish ‘that guy wouldn’t do that again,’” Coleman said. “This movie to me, ‘Hidden Figures,’ I like to call it ‘Hidden Family.’ When we think about the problems we have on Earth to solve, it’s really going to take some looking around and having people on your team that you hadn’t understood already were important.”