In the fall of my sophomore year of college I registered for an honors physics class. I had to get permission to take an overload, and then shortly afterward I was too overwhelmed to manage it. I wound up dropping the class to carry the usual number of credits, thinking I'd pick it up again in another term. Elwood's best friend brought it up at a party shortly after the drop deadline. "I should have known a girl couldn't handle honors physics," he said unkindly. "I can handle honors physics," I told him. He was unconvinced, and unpleasant about his unconvinced-ness. After some back and forth I took hold of his shirt's collar, pulling it slightly away from his body. I took my plastic cup full of beer and poured the entire thing down the funnel I had created.
Gravity in action, baby.
Except at at the time I was not AT ALL flippant about it. I was so ashamed of myself. I had lost my cool; I had been rude to my boyfriend's best friend; I had confirmed his stereotype that women ("girls") were unpredictable and other.
In high school I thought I wanted to be an engineer. In my eighth-grade physical science textbook I read a sidebar of Newton's laws and -- this sounds implausible but it is true -- it was like a religious experience. They spoke to me of a God of order, of a fundamentally comprehensible world. It was as if a bright light had clicked on inside my head, and all that day I basked in its glow. I remember playing with numbers as a 13-year-old, wondering why squares were separated by consecutive odd numbers. When I got to high school I started competing with the math team, which was both joyful and terrifying. I hadn't known until then that I could be good at math.
In my memories of the beer-bath incident, there is an odd lacuna. I remember apologizing profusely. I have a vague memory of his saying something like, "Yeah, sorry I was rude." But I do not recall any apology for the sexism-- only for the failure to be politely sexist. It was not strange, in 1988, for a man to assert that my chromosomes left me incapable of taking honors physics. (P.S. I re-registered for honors physics two years later, when I was not carrying an overload. It went fine, TYVM.)
This is on my mind because I went to see Hidden Figures today. It made me cry an improbable number of times. I was also a girl from West Virginia who loved math and science in a world often skeptical of my capacity to handle math and science. And yet I only know one slice of the frustrations the movie describes. The racism is painful to see, but the women keep pushing back against it. It's exhausting and beautiful. I loved the glimpses of their families and their community, the things that sustain them in a workplace -- and a wider world -- where everyone in a position of power is white. (That Paul Stafford character? I should maybe not be trusted around him with a beer in hand, I'm just saying.)
There's a tense scene while John Glenn is in flight, and even though I knew how the story would end I was still biting my nails. John Glenn got to be considered a hero because he did something hard and uncertain. And also -- this part never dawned on me before today -- John Glenn got to be a hero because of an army of smart people, all striving to do something that had never been done before. It put me in mind of that prayer I love from St. Thomas Aquinas, the one that talks about God calling us out of the double darkness of sin and ignorance. This is one of the things I am most grateful for about the Catholic Church: her certainty that we can glorify God by dispelling ignorance. And oh-- when we do! When John Glenn soared above the earth I cried again, because it reminded me that human effort and determination can lead to glorious freedom. The movie makes it clear just how hard it was to put a person into space and bring him back again. The fruit of their brainpower and his bravery was that fantastic flight; their joint efforts allowed him to tread the high untrespassed sanctity of space.
It would have been so easy for the women in Hidden Figures to quit, but they persevered. I am still thinking about the laborious, repetitive nature of Katherine Johnson's work-- calculating and re-calculating trajectories by hand. Tomorrow morning I have some number-crunching at the top of my to-do list. I will sit down at my desk and fire up R and tell it to give me a batch of standardized residuals so I can see how well they perform in a different set of models. I am...a little weak in the knees at the prospect of doing that by hand, and yet Katherine Johnson spent her days immersed in much more complex equations. Coincidentally, this project has a racial justice focus. I am collaborating with someone whose research focuses specifically on the problem of over-identification of African-American kids as impaired, and their under-identification as gifted. We are looking at results for a tool that could help schools to get it right more often.
And so tomorrow as I sift through my models, I will remember those gifted girls who grew into gifted women. I will be grateful for the progress we've made since 1961, and grateful for the opportunity to work as a woman scientist in a department full of woman scientists, with a woman scientist as my boss. I do not know how much of an impact this work will have against the enormous ugly hydra of racism, but I will do my bit and hope for the best. Because I may never travel into space, but at its very best moments my work, too, allows me to put out my hand and touch the face of God.
Lovely.
I'm thinking of taking my daughter to see Hidden Figures - would it be appropriate for a 10yo?
Posted by: bearing | March 05, 2017 at 10:27 PM
Beautiful posting! Awesome paper topic...it's something I would give my students to read and discuss!
Posted by: Gina | March 06, 2017 at 07:07 AM
Thank you! There's absolutely nothing inappropriate in it, Bearing. I think they made it suitable for math-loving girls on purpose. She might find it a touch slow-moving, but only a touch.
Posted by: Jamie | March 06, 2017 at 07:20 AM
Beautiful.
Posted by: Melanie B | March 06, 2017 at 08:22 PM
I'm looking for a voting button so that I can comment "plus one".
The first calculus-based physics class I taught at my present job had two dozen men and zero women enrolled. I made an effort to point this out a few times, just to encourage the students to wonder whether that's a thing that is (or that should be) normal, and whether there is anything they could do about it outside of class. One day H was sick and came with me on a day that I taught that class; the very first thing she said afterwards was "Why weren't there any girls?"
Posted by: Rob | March 07, 2017 at 09:06 AM