[Dr4kn]

From the same [article](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...) (during the space race)

At its bases, NASA employed nearly 80 black women as computers, says Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures. One of them, Katherine Johnson, was so revered for her abilities that in 1962, John Glenn asked her to personally verify the flight path of his first launch into space on the Friendship 7 mission. The astronauts didn’t trust the newfangled digital computers, which were prone to crashing. Glenn wanted human eyes on the problem.

“They had a tremendous amount of respect for these women and their mathematical abilities,” says Shetterly. “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 women wouldn't have been employed without the engineering work, but the engineering work wouldn't have been possible without these women. They were equally the brains behind getting things to space. A sizable number of these women later became programmers, because building the computers was seen as the really difficult task. Coding was dull work. Writing code that gets people safely to the moon and back was obviously trivial.