Hidden Figures

One of my biggest criticisms of this book is that, because of the shifts in chronology and a few moments of anachronism, it's sometimes hard to figure out when things took place without either prior knowledge or spending some time glimpsing back through what's been read. Some chapters might run through a set of years, with following chapters running through parts of that time frame again from another perspective. There's at least one time, pre-marriage and at a point where she'd only been referred to as Katherine Goble, was referred to as Katherine Johnson, which left it sounding awkward for a brief moment.

My next major criticism was a lack of information on the science and maths side of things, which I think would've added a lot more interest. Having an appendix to have moments where the theory, equations, or programs were described in a bit more detail would've been nice, even if it was incredibly basic (or simply organising the bibliography in a manner to help pinpoint where to look for that information).

With those out of the way, I love being able to read this side of science history; these are women who've been left out of the books for far too long, with sparse mentions of what they've done. I enjoyed reading about all the ways in which they interacted with their work environment to try to improve the situations for themselves and those who came after them; I liked seeing how they interacted in their communities, how the shift in communities changed, the changing landscapes for the jobs and the job titles (how women, especially women of colour, were often left on the sidelines with titles that had lower associated pay but higher credentials)... I even really liked the small glimpse at how the movement of upwardly-mobile black communities to black suburbs made it harder for the poorer and less mobile black people they left behind to see what they could become or to interact in areas of the community that helped them connect to these opportunities; this was more because it shows how we all need for our all of our communities to be integrated and how that integration impacts everyone, even in terms of class. There are so many things in this book to connect to, that we still see in our world today (racism, sexism, classism).

I feel like this is also a result of one of the major negative impacts of how we view STEM and all fields associated with it, with the focus on a handful of people being recognised for the contributions of the many (for example: Nobel Prizes can only be given to up to three people of a project, and they all must be alive because it can't be done posthumously); we act as if all these discoveries were done by a the few (typically white men), while we ignore all the other people who've been working alongside them (women and people of colour, for instance). Because we refuse to see the large teams working on these endeavours, we intentionally hide all the different people who've worked on everything behind the one, two, or three faces we deem as being "most important." That kind of view has actually been hurting science in a lot of ways, removing it from the community it should be helping and making it more and more inaccessible.