When trying to decide what movie to see, my husband and I compromise. I like Matt Damon, he likes intelligent movies, so we’ve watched the Jason Bourne movies over and over. Watching “Hidden Figures,” we both won. He loves math. I love movies where women are able to realize their full potential.
For those who haven’t seen the movie, Taraji Henson plays the main character, Katherine G. Johnson. In real life, Johnson was a mathematical prodigy who found her way to NASA as a human computer – a person who double checked the numbers NASA engineers generated.
Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan, a woman who has a natural ability with machines and taught herself computer programming. Janelle Monae plays Mary Jackson, a young woman who’s bound and determined to attend engineering school.
Although this story is about black women in the 1960s, there are parallels for all women. When I was in high school in the early 1970s, girls were steered toward careers in nursing, going to secretarial school or learning how to sew and cook.
The boys were advised to go into engineering or the petrochemical industry, especially because we lived in the shadows of so many refineries and chemical plants.
There were some who broke out of the mold and made their way to bigger cities and bigger dreams. But so many of us didn’t realize how big a world it was out there. Some, like the women in “Hidden Figures,” not only saw that dream but broke down every barrier to achieve them.
I was lucky in that my dad believed women could accomplish anything they wanted. Unfortunately, I didn’t see those possibilities until I saw the glass ceiling for myself.
When I was 18, I was working as a summer Kelly Girl in the purchasing department of a paper mill. One of the older ladies in the office knew everything about the company, and was the “go-to” person.
When a promotion came up that she was perfect for, Anne was turned down because she was a woman. More than that, she had to suffer the humiliation of training a fresh-out-of-college boy who didn’t know a paper mill from a pepper mill to do the job she’d been doing for years.
I thought about Anne when I was watching “Hidden Figures,” knowing the struggle women have cuts across culture and color lines. But as we see women making strides in the world, it’s easy to overlook that the struggle is still ongoing.
The “Chicago Tribune” reported on a study of 3,000 respondents stating that women are often the ones in the office who are looked at to plan birthday parties. When a co-worker announces she’s going to have a baby, it’s usually a woman who organizes the baby shower.
Not that men aren’t just as capable of these tasks, but we still live in a world where there’s “women’s work” and “men’s work.” These divisions of labor based on one’s gender is particularly customary in developing countries, but the United States still has a long way to go.
As always, education is the answer. Parents, teach your daughters that they can achieve anything their hearts and minds can imagine. Tell them to break down the doors that stand in the way of their becoming all they can be. And teach your sons to not be the ones holding the door shut.
Grandparents, tell and retell the stories of bigotry and prejudice from your childhood days and remind your grandchildren that the only way to stop inequality is through education and acceptance. And that starts with them.
Hopes are that the movie “Hidden Figures” can open up conversations between generations about appreciating how far women have come, who we have to thank for going through the doors first and how far we still have to go.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.