Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

Wilberforce. By securing jobs in
Langley’s West Computing section, they
now had pledged one of the world’s most
exclusive sororities. In 1940, just 2
percent of all black women earned
college degrees, and 60 percent of those
women became teachers, mostly in
public elementary and high schools.
Exactly zero percent of those 1940
college graduates became engineers. And
yet, in an era when just 10 percent of
white women and not even a full third of
white men had earned college degrees,
the West Computers had found jobs and
each other at the “single best and biggest
aeronautical research complex in the
world.”
At the front of the room, like teachers
in a classroom, sat two former East Area
Computers: Margery Hannah, West