Hidden Figures: Diversity and Inclusion in Workplace
“Hidden Figures” is an American film released in 2016 based on the true story described by the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race” written by Margot Lee Shetterly.
It revolves around African-American Black Women working at NASA as mathematicians(or as the movie says “computers” as the job description) during the Space Race. Their work lets the man explore space. Its main characters are Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson working as “computers”. Katherine Johnson worked at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in 1961, along with her colleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. Given Katherine’s analytic geometry skills, white supervisor Vivian Mitchell assigns her to help Al Harrison’s Space Task Group as the first female African-American. Mary is a member of the heat shield team for the space capsule. Mitchell informs her that, despite her mathematics and physical science degrees, the post necessitates more coursework. Mary petitions for permission to attend an all-white school. Hampton High School is a public high school in Hampton, Virginia. They suffered the segregation by race and sex imposed on them by the society and the work environment of their time due to being Black Women. The film lets us walk through events that caused these women to overcome this discrimination by raising their voices and doing hard work. Their hard work eventually shatters the walls of discrimination and their professional work is appreciated regardless of their race and sex. Mary Jackson becomes the first female African-American engineer at NASA. Dorothy Vaughan keeps doing her work at NASA but as the African-American supervisor. Katherine Johnson after performing trajectory analysis for Alan Shepherd’s 1961 mission aiming for the first American human space flight goes on to calculate the trajectories for the Apollo 11 and Space Shuttle missions.
Relation to Organizational Diversity
The film raises a number of issues and scenarios that may be applied to many cultures in which minority communities collaborate with majority groups, as well as during culturally complicated periods of time, all under the banner of unfair and unequal institutional or government practices. It highly relates to the week 1 topic which describes Organizational Diversity. Organizational diversity existed in NASA due to the presence of two different races and two different sex. It meant equal job opportunities to a diversified group of people which was missing during the early part of the film but it was gradually practiced as some Black Women described in the film fought for it. The existence of diversity invites challenges as well as benefits to the company.
BENEFITS
Diversity promotes higher creativity as depicted by Katherine Johnson where she looks at the problem from a new angle and gets it done by incorporating her own ideas and others, specifically Paul Stafford.
Promoting diversity results in higher performance by the employees as depicted in a scenario where letting Katherine Johnson attend the board meetings helped her be informative for higher performance and better decision making.
ISSUES
People in the workplace segregate themselves based on their gender and race as depicted by the film.
Black Women and white people had a salary gap and Blacks were not offered higher positions. among them as described in the film by Dorothy Vaughan where despite her capabilities she was not being appointed Supervisor as she was Black Woman.
The work of Katherine Johnson in the Space Task group helps us learn that inclusion without a sense of welcome and belonging has a negative impact on the performance and results of the employee. Once a candidate from a diverse background has made it into the team, all efforts must be made to equalize and normalize the team experience for them as for anyone else.
Striking Scene
The most striking scene to me from the film was where Harrison confronts Katherine about her “breaks,” oblivious to the fact that she must go half a mile (800 meters) to the nearest colored people’s restroom. Katherine Johnson raises her voice for her rights and the discrimination that she suffered during her work. When asked why she disappears from her desk several minutes a day, she enlightens her supervisor about the discrimination of not using the White Restrooms and the left out feeling she had felt at not using the same coffee machine that white people use. The reaction of the supervisor Mr. Harrison to this situation and enlightenment is admiring where he shatters the wall of discrimination by removing the label “COLORED” from the coffee maker and Restrooms.
