Hello! Welcome back to my blog! I am happy to be back in Singapore, even though I loved our vacation. After all, there is no place like home. My mom often uses the quote, “Mid Pleasures and Palaces though we may roam, be is ever so humble, there is no place like home.”
Today, I will be talking about a movie called Hidden Figures. My family has a tradition of watching a movie together every Sunday. Today, we picked Hidden Figures as our movie! In case you don’t know, the movie is about three black women who work at NASA. Each one of those women made a strong impact in NASA, eventually getting recognized. However, their path was full of struggles.
Firstly, let me tell you about the characters. The three women who worked in NASA were Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson.
Dorothy Vaughan worked in West Area Computing at NASA. She did the job of a supervisor, although she never received the title or pay for it. When NASA introduced the IBM mainframe machine, even though no one told her to, Dorothy figured out how to operate the machine, when no one else knew how to. She also fought for her own rights. For example, when she and her sons were in the library, the librarian wouldn’t let her borrow a book due to the color of her skin and kicked Dorothy and her children out of the library. The children soon found out that Dorothy still took the book. That action displayed her teaching her kids that it was important to fight for their rights.
Similarly, Mary Jackson also displayed that quality when she figured out that she couldn’t be in the engineering department at NASA unless she took extra courses at Hampton High School. The only problem was that Hampton High School was segregated. Therefore, she couldn’t go there but Mary didn’t give up. She went to court, fought her case and won ! This is inspiring because it paved the way for many people after her.
Finally, let’s talk about Katherine Johnson. She was an amazing mathematician, becoming the top student in her class. She was given a promotion in NASA to go work in the main team to do complicated math to help astronauts go to outer space. She was truly exceptional in standing up for herself. For example, when her boss Al Harrison asked her where she was gone for 40 minutes and she said the bathroom, he was pretty mad. Then, she stood up for herself, assertively explaining how she had to run over a mile just to go to the bathroom because there was no bathroom for her in the building. What she said was very powerful, because Mr. Harrison ended up removing the segregation so anyone could go to any bathroom.
Hidden Figures is an extraordinary movie about race and gender equality. It is also inspirational as these women overcame several struggles to achieve their dreams.
My mom, Lavanya Chari, recently did an interview with Bloomberg in which she said “ In addition to providing equal opportunities for all, I truly believe that gender equity drives better performance in an organization “. I strongly agree with her, and it relates to Hidden Figures very well.
I hope all of you also keep in mind that it is important to never judge someone based on their race or gender and to instead treat them as an equal. Everyone has it in them to achieve their dreams.
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