Film Analysis: Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures is a film about three African American women, who work at NASA in Hampton Virginia, Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine is a gifted mathematician, who is move to work in an all white male team, that is working on launching an man into space. Kartherine struggle to prove herself, as her colleagues doubt her ability since she is a woman of color. Mary Jackson has the dream to become an engineer, yet NASA will not take her since she does not have the right education requirements. She has to fight to go to an all white school, to get her education she needs to become an engineer. Dorthy Vaughan is an informal supervisor of the African American women computers. She goes on to learn Fortran, the computer language of IBM. She then teaches in to the women she supervises, so they will have a job when the IBM arrives. These women help blaze the path for women in STEM.
This film covers the subject of women of color pioneers in the field of STEM. It shows the obstacles they have to overcome so that other women could
In class someone brought up the scenes where Katherine is running across the campus at NASA to use the bathroom that is labeled colored. It has been said that this is not accurate to what really happened. Yet from this the watcher see Katherine boss, Al Harrison, smashing the colored sign at the bathroom down, so she can use one closer to where she is working. Some have said that it was done to give a white man the ability to do the right thing. This is really interesting that in a film that focus on women accomplishment, that there still needs to be this male hero, This is really the only time that a man in the film is doing anything that might be considered heroic. For the most part the men in the film are racist and sexist. As a society is it so normal that a man is the hero, that even in a film about female heroes there still needs to be a male