“Petite Engineer Likes Math, Music”
NASA Women at Work in the 1960s
Christina Roberts
PhD Student, UCSB
History Dept.
Tuesday March 28, 2023
12:30pm-1:30pm
Abstract:
During the 20th century NASA employed more white men as scientists and engineers than women or people of color. However, NASA also conducted a publicity campaign to recruit women scientists and engineers in the early 1960s, ironically not long after they rejected the idea of training women astronauts. In fact, women did work at NASA, including Black women mathematics computers and computer programmers. NASA also employed white women, and occasionally Black women as scientists and engineers during the space race, but the agency wanted to hire more. From 1959-1968 NASA advertised job opportunities for women scientists and engineers in speeches, news releases and newspaper articles across the country, in which the public encountered stories about young, white, and occasionally Black college-educated women scientists and engineers already working at NASA. Many of those women declared that NASA did not discriminate based on sex, but rather, that NASA hired women for science and engineering jobs based only on their merit. In “Petite Engineer Likes Math, Music: Women at Work, NASA in the 1960s” UCSB PhD student Christina Roberts will discuss what NASA’s hiring campaign suggested about the agency’s view of gender and race employment issues during the Civil Rights Era, as well as discuss the challenges and choices that women faced in science and engineering fields.
Bios:
Christina Roberts is a PhD Student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies the history of science education in the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on NASA’s Spacemobile program, a traveling science lecture and demonstration program that visited schools and civic groups in the United States for several decades, and fifty countries during the 1960s. Christina is a Teaching Assistant in the History and Writing Department at UCSB. For fun, Christina loves to pull weeds in the garden and take long walks in the sunshine with her husband
