During World War II and immediately after, another significant change began to emerge at Langley, as women began stepping into larger roles, and in larger numbers. But the roots of that trend went back much further, to women such as Pearl I. Young and Kitty O’Brien Joyner.
They were the among the women who first opened doors at the lab, in an era when females were widely assumed to have no interest and no aptitude for science and engineering.
Young’s legacy lives on at what is now NASA Langley, 95 years after she first set foot in Hampton.
Young, a physicist who graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1919 as a Phi Beta Kappa physics, chemistry and mathematics triple major, was coming to work at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory as its first woman professional.
Young paved the way for scores of other women to follow pursuits in science, technology, engineering and math fields at the NACA and later NASA. The Langley Lab, along with other federal sites, became a hub for women seeking employment they couldn’t obtain elsewhere because of limitations on where women should work — and later about what academic fields they should study.
“They’re very proud of the fact, not only at Langley but at their other centers across the country, they had women they had employed well before World War II started,” said historian and author Yarsinske, whose latest work will chronicle Langley’s first century. “And they were very proud of that, because it became such an issue in other industries but not for them. And they look back at and go ‘Jeez, we didn’t realize how far ahead we were, but we’re perceived as being way different than everybody else.’
“And I don’t think they even thought about it at the time, just proud of the work they were producing. The work was everything.”
The theme of work being the ultimate test of an employee at Langley was visible starting with Young’s contributions and is carried through today in the thousands of women who have worked at Langley.
Young, born in 1895, came to Langley in 1922. The campus was small — Young said in an interview nearly 50 years later that she met all 32 employees when she started — but that shouldn’t undermine Young’s significance.
At the time of her hiring, there was only one other female physicist working in the federal government, at the National Bureau of Standards.
Young spent the first seven years of her career in the Instrument Research Division, assembling and calibrating instrumentation to measure pressures on aircraft in flight.
After some time, Young noticed that the technical writings of the young engineers at Langley were lacking in cohesion and clarity. Her former boss, Harry J.E. Reid, who was promoted to Langley’s engineer in charge, appointed Young as the lab’s first chief technical editor in 1929.
Young started the new office, hiring qualified staff. She formulated a system to make sure that the technical documents highlighting the latest discoveries made in the lab would be effectively communicated.
All documents and reports to be released had to be properly vetted by other engineers, and Young’s staff edited and revised until the reports were clear. According to NASA, she “insisted that all reports be checked and rechecked for consistency, logical analysis and absolute accuracy.”
The slowed pace of disseminating information frustrated the engineers who were eager to let their work be known, as well as the clients who wanted answers quickly.
But Young’s approach paid off: The NACA published more than 16,000 research reports during its existence pre-NASA, the majority of which followed Young’s “Style Manual for Engineering Authors” published in 1943. Parts of the manual still are used today.
Young moved in 1943 to the new NACA Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland, leaving behind her staff of eight women. She then spent time as a professor, before returning to Hampton as a technical literature analyst.
She retired from NASA in 1961, and today, the Pearl Young Theater — the second of that name, as the first was replaced and now is used for storage — stands at Langley in her honor. When Young died in 1968, her will included leaving the City of Hampton about $15,000 to add benches and shelters at bus stops throughout Hampton, according to NASA archives.
Kitty O’Brien Joyner, an electrical engineer from Charlottesville, became the lab’s first female engineer in 1939.
She began her career shortly after graduating from the University of Virginia. She sued the university for her right to attend the all-male engineering school.
Around the same time Joyner arrived, women were bringing their skills to the lab as “human computers.” The first cohort of the “computers who wore skirts,” as Katherine G. Johnson has often described herself and her colleagues, was hired in 1935.
The women, a group that began with five, computed by hand the math that engineers needed to conduct their research, which sped up the process.
World War II
The number of women — and employees — multiplied during World War II as the NACA’s contributions to the war effort increased and its literal manpower decreased. White and black women were both recruited by the lab to keep up with needs.
“Basically during WWII, there was a great influx of women out here at the center, as there was across the United States, into manufacturing and research,” said Gail Langevin, Langley’s historian. “They did many things: typing, filing, messenger service. But they also did things like work in shops and laboratories and they operated machinery; they operated things like band saws, planers, drill presses, but they also helped operate the wind tunnels.”
An April 1942 memo highlighted how key the computers were to the center: “The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could.” According to NACA/NASA Equal Employment Programs files, Langley had 959 female employees in June 1944, about 36 percent of the center’s 2,700 employees.
“They are the proof that when you open this door of opportunity to really talented people, then you create a virtuous circle,” said Margot Lee Shetterly, whose book “Hidden Figures” about the human computers was made into an Oscar-nominated movie. “These women were absolutely critical to the work that was getting done. They were smart, they were given a chance and came in and overperformed, both individually and as a group. Any questions that people have about whether women are good at math, I think, can be statistically disproven or proven, whichever side you want to take, by the evidence of these women and their achievement.
“I was stunned, really, not just by the number of women — that was the first thing I couldn’t believe, how many women there were doing this work. But really the breadth of the work, the diversity of the work they were doing and the hands-on nature, the fact that a lot of these women were publishing research, that they were contributing in a very hands-on way.
“They weren’t just sort of passive number crunchers,” she said. “They were partners with the engineers in the analysis and doing this work and shaping this very exciting new industry, industries that were being formed. I really can’t say enough about the work that all of these women did and the contributions that they made to aeronautics, that they made to NASA and that they made to our country, a tremendous service to our country.”
Climbing the ranks
Post-war, women continued the work as the segregated facilities consolidated. Women from that time period continued up the ranks, although some slower than they would have liked.
Christine Mann Darden began her time at Langley as a computer in the desegregated facilities. Her 40-year career as an aerospace engineer included 20 years spent in sonic boom research and was capped by time in management as the director of the Office of Strategic Communications and Education.
She said that as a black leader, she noticed things changing over the course of her career.
“White females weren’t managers either,” Darden said. “There was a change, I guess, when women started going into engineering in school, and the younger engineers actually worked with the females better than the older engineers did. That was a factor, and you started seeing women moving up in management areas around there.
“But I do remember thinking, ‘I really don’t have anybody to talk to when I’ve got an issue or a problem.’ I probably talked to men.”
Over the years, Langley continued to attract and seek women who could fill the ranks through the its apprentice program, a concerted effort that began in the ’70s but flourished in the ’80s, Langevin said. More women joined the administrative ranks in Senior Executive Service.
Lesa Roe, first hired by NASA in 1987, became the center’s first female director in 2005, a position she held until she became the deputy associate administrator of NASA in 2014.
Roe had an open-door policy, said Tahani Amer, an aerospace engineer, and helped women with career planning and opportunities.
“I think this kind of environment really indirectly supported us,” Amer said.
Amer is one of several women in the midst of 20-plus-year careers at Langley who have been identified by NASA as “Modern Figures,” current female employees standing on the shoulders of the trailblazers popularized by “Hidden Figures.” According to the Office of Human Capital Management, the current workforce at Langley is 28 percent female.
Amer, a Muslim who grew up in Egypt; Debbie Martinez, a self-described “Puerto Rican from the Bronx;” and Mia Siochi, a native of the Philippines, each said they’ve seen progress in the addition of women at the center in their time there.
“The branch I came into had a significant number of females, and females who are highly respected in their technical field,” Siochi, whose career at Langley began in 1990 as a contractor. “I didn’t realize how different that was until one of the first meetings I went to, ‘OK, there are like 100 people here, (but) there are only three of us.’ ... When you work here, that is not highlighted, because it’s kind of gender-neutral when you’re working together because it’s all about your competence and your contribution to the team, right?
“And that’s what carries you, it’s not because you’re male or female. We’re fortunate to have that kind of environment.”
Martinez, who started a website highlighting the women at Langley and later another featuring Latina women across NASA, said that there were times when she’d be the only woman in the room, but that the numbers have increased over the years. Ultimately, she said, her work spoke for itself.
“I didn’t let that hang me up. I just took it for what it was,” she said. “I think here with NASA, one of the things I’ve seen that is consistent throughout all these years, is if you do your job and you are reliable, and you’re consistent, that’s what carries you. That’s what the rest of the team is expecting of you.”
The message of current women employees at the center is similar to those from nearly a century ago: show up, do good work and it will be rewarded.
“I was very lucky with NASA’s environment. Look at us,” Amer said, gesturing to Martinez and Siochi. “Different backgrounds, why are we together? It’s because (of) what we can contribute to NASA’s missions and goals, because we believe in what we do. We feel it’s important for the nation, it’s important for the world.”
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