Racism was exaggerated

Funny how Ranb complains about you making up facts to make an argument, while that's exactly what this movie does.

"Someone else pointed out that these women weren't as spectacular as they made themselves out to be in the book."

SO much stupid in one post. Wow:

Why on earth are you claiming these women "made themselves out" in Any particular way? This book was written by Margot Lee Shetterly. . .NOT any of the women profiled. How does that lead you to bray such an absurdity?

But sure, let's review: Katherine Johnson broke new ground in the mathematics of space travel, NASA dedicated a BUILDING to her, and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Mary Jackson became the nation's (world's!) first black aerospace engineer, earned the Congressional Gold Medal, and had the Washington, D.C. *headquarters* of NASA named after her. Dorothy Vaughan taught herself Fortran, rose to the head of ACD at Langley, has a satellite and a lunar crater named after her, and also earned a Congressional Gold Medal.

Nah. Nothing spectacular about these women at all. Not by their estimation, yours, or the author's.

Try this: stack up Your accomplishments against any of these women. When you're done (let's face it, you're Already done), reflect on the fact that the very real persecution Irish Americans (what on earth is an "Irish European"???) faced is irrelevant, for the purposes of this discussion. Nobody's saying other folks didn't have it bad. *This* movie is about three special women who achieved dizzying heights, in decidedly difficult circumstances.

But you knew all that already. You're just making a pathetic attempt to stir the pot. Congratulations: you've embarrassed yourself. You can go now.

"paying black women to double-check the work of white male scientists"

Interesting point.

The women did their own calculations which was considered women's work:

"Women were welcome as computers partly because the work was viewed as a dull, low-status activity. Men with elite educations generally wanted no part in it. Not only were women hired, but so were blacks, polio survivors, Jews and others who were routinely iced out of job opportunities.

“The reason that these pre-electronic computation jobs were feminized is they were seen as rote and de-skilled,” says Mar Hicks, a historian and author of Programmed Inequality. It wasn’t true, though: “In a lot of cases, the women doing these computation jobs actually had to have pretty advanced math skills and math training, especially if they were doing very complex calculations.

The work could require superhuman endurance, though. “They had to keep working eight hours a day doing the same equation over and over again—it must have been mind-numbing.”

“The male engineers often were not good mathematicians. So the women made their work possible.” Still, some friction existed. Women who asked for promotions got stonewalled or turned down: “For women who wanted to move up, who wanted to be supervisors—particularly if that involves supervising men? Not so much.”

The human computers faced an even more existential threat: digital computers, which promised to work with far greater speed and to handle complex math—like inverting a 10x10 matrix—beyond the ken of even the most adroit human with a pencil.

Women, though, were among the original coders of these strange new digital brains, because in the early days programming, too, was seen as dull work.

The earliest programmers for the Eniac—the military-funded first programmable general-purpose computer—were entirely women, plucked from the ranks of the Army’s human computers. And though they wound up inventing brilliant coding techniques, they received none of the glory: When the Army showed off the Eniac to the press, running lightning-fast ballistics-crunching algorithms, it didn’t introduce the women who’d written the code."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-computers-180972202/