Organizational Behavior

Hassan Javaid
BESE 9B
13-02-22

Submitted to: Mam Zuba Akhtar

 Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures is a movie that will simultaneously inspire and make people angry at the
injustice African-American women faced both in professional and daily life. The main characters
of Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan worked at NASA and saw many
opportunities for their professional growth; however, their bosses and colleagues did not offer
these women support nor did they respect their dignity since they were all African-American.
Overcoming racist and sexist discrimination, these women established themselves as brilliant
mathematicians and engineers and helped lead the United States to victory in some of the
pivotal moments of the Cold War-era space race—including John Glenn’s 1962 orbit of the
Earth. The scene of their success was the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in the
Hampton Roads region of Virginia. It was here, in the heartland of American segregation, that a
group of extraordinary women, including Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine
Johnson, helped their country break through the color barrier and leap into the great unknown.
After WW-II, Facilities like Langley began to hire qualified women in large numbers to work as
mathematicians and number-crunchers. Despite the opportunity, new arrivals to Langley like
Dorothy still had to face the prejudice of living and working in a segregated city of the American
South at the height of the Jim Crow era. Black people had to use separate bathrooms, separate
drinking fountains, separate entrances on buses, send their children to separate schools, and
live in separate neighborhoods. A separate area of the facility, known as West Area Computing,
was reserved for the new black female computers. Moreover, they were not allowed to study
the engineering programs at High Schools with the White citizens. And also, there were earning
gaps between the Blacks and Whites; Dorothy was doing all the work of supervisor but she was
not given the salary of one nor the status just due to her color complexion. The White officials
did not want to see any negro on the seat of supervisor, because of the stereotypes and
because they always underestimated the black people.
While working at NASA, these Black women had to face tremendous issues on their way to
progress. Their contributions to the Space program were devalued due to the segregation
policies at the workplace. Due to these policies, they could not even perform the tasks they
were assigned by the supervisors. Despite all these challenges, these women worked hard to
prove themselves as the beneficial assets to the organization. The diversity of people groups at
workplace sped up the work of Space Task Group. The computation skills and intellectual minds
of the Black people helped NASA to achieve the goals that would not have been possible
without them. It would not be possible to figure the engineering problems with the capsule of
the space craft without Mary Jackson. They were unable to complete the mission of orbiting the
Earth without these heroic characters, even when they had the IBM (mainframe computers),
and their astronauts relied more on the calculations of the Black Computers than those
mainframe computers.
The most astonishing scene of the movie is Dorothy teaching herself and her co-workers how to
program, when she senses that the IBM computers will make her skills obsolete and her co-
workers will be left unemployed. She did not only want to secure her future, but did a great
favor to her colleagues, and more importantly she fixed the IBMs at NASA which the White IBM
technicians could not do. Moreover, the scene in which Harrison tells all the team they’ll need
to call their wives and stay late until they find a solution. The team is almost all men, all dressed
alike, in white button-down shirts and black ties, with Katherine wearing a green dress and the
other woman in the office wearing a gray one. The assumption that there is a ‘wife at home’ to
take care of everything is still prevalent today and still hurts working women. This scene really
moved me because Katherine was the one who was working as both father and mother to her
children and was the least valued person in that office at that time. But her hard-work and
determination helped to attain higher positions in the office later on.