User:Minerva T./new sandbox

One issue that NASA faced in recruiting women and minorities for the space program was that throughout NASA's history, the astronauts had always been white men. (This statement is not entirely true. There was one African American male and a Native American.) Another issue was that NASA was not looking for women to work with them outside of specific areas until the government ratified the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. (This is not true. Women have been part of NASA since the 1920's. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory prided itself on using women engineers early on.) Even then, there was tension in the work place between men and women, and many men did not like that they had to accommodate women, such as bathrooms in buildings and spacecraft.(There were always women's bathrooms. The issue was that bathrooms for women of color was restricted to their work areas making it difficult if they were assigned to other sections that were considered "white."

The first female engineer for NASA was Kitty O'Brien Joyner, hired in 1939 at Langley.

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Dana Ulery, first woman engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Apollo guidance computer lead programmer Margaret Hamilton with software that was written by her and her team

Women first worked in support as administrators, secretaries, doctors, psychologists, and later engineers (Totally re-do this sentence. Add computers starting in 1930s). In the 1960s, NASA started recruiting women and minorities for the space program(This is not true. Rewrite). By the end of the 1960s, NASA had employed thousands of women. Some of the women like Mary Shep Burton, Gloria B. Martinez (the first spanish woman hired), Cathy Osgood, and Shirley Hunt worked in the computer division while Sue Erwin, Lois Ransdell, and Maureen Bowen worked as secretaries for various members of the Mission and Flight Control teams. Dana Ulery was the first woman engineer to be hired at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA. Although she was only considered as a junior engineer, for more than seven years, no woman engineer got into JPL besides Ulery. Another woman, Donna Shirley, worked in JPL as a mission engineer in the 1960s. Also, Dr. Carolyn Huntoon, a woman, was a pioneer in researching astronaut metabolisms and other body systems. Margaret Hamilton was the guidance computer lead programmer for the Apollo program. Judy Sullivan was the lead biomedical engineer for the Apollo 11 mission.

Although woman had a difficult time establishing themselves within the organization, NASA did have some women who charted unknown territory throughout the time period. For example, Katherine Johnson was one of the most prolific figures in NASA history. Johnson worked through the ranks as a black woman and made it as one of the top and most respected engineers on the Apollo mission. This was seen as a major step for blacks and women throughout NASA and the general public for others to look up to. Along with Katherine Johnson, who ended up playing a pivotal role as a computer for NASA, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson helped calculate integral equations and mathematical calculations to recheck and assure that the launching of spacecraft was calculated correctly. Overall, these figures stood as pioneers to the growing commonality of women working for NASA. [1]

However, not everyone was accepting of this phenomenon. In 1962, George Low, NASA's Chief of Manned Spaceflight, fought against women by telling the congress that working with women would delay his work. Meanwhile, in the same year, John Kennedy signed the President's Commission on the Status of Women to encourage gender equality in the workforce. This eventually led to James Webb, a NASA administrator, creating an agency-wide policy directive stating that NASA provides equal opportunities for all kinds of people willing to work with NASA. Despite this, no women were selected to join the astronaut corps in 1963/65/66/67.