Title IX News

WASHINGTON — Last Thursday (Sept. 12), three women who were critical to the success of the Apollo program spoke at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum here about their experiences as scientists and engineers at NASA.

At the museum’s 2019 John H. Glenn Lecture in Space History, moderator, museum director and former NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan spoke with Poppy Northcutt, an engineer and “computer” who worked as the first-ever woman in an operational support role in mission control during Apollo 8,  JoAnn Hardin Morgan, an aerospace engineer who was the only woman working in the firing room for Apollo 11, and Carolyn Leach Huntoon, who directed and conducted medical research at NASA and was the first American woman to serve as director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. 

The three panelists were additionally joined by a surprise last minute guest in the audience — Marion Lee Johnson, a Black History Month honoree, legendary “hidden figure” and engineer who calculated trajectories for the Saturn V rocket and was integral to the success of the Apollo program. 

Related: These Amazing Women Made NASA’s Apollo Missions Possible

JoAnn Hardin Morgan

The panel, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo lunar missions, began with a video showing the museum’s “Go for the Moon” event, which recreated the Apollo 11 lunar landing. 

“I knew at the time of Apollo 11 I was working on something incredibly important,” Morgan, who additionally became the first woman to serve as a senior executive at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, said at the panel. To a diverse crowd containing a number of hopeful, inspired young women, Morgan spoke about how she was a math whiz in school and became more interested in space with the discovery of the Van Allen Belts. 

“In my mind, I thought, this is profound new knowledge for everybody on our planet and this whole launching business and going to space … it’s gonna change the world I live in and I am getting in on it,” she said. 

Morgan discussed her career and how the few women who worked in higher-level technical positions like her all knew each other and banded together, despite working in different departments. She also touched on the fact that, while she was the only woman in the firing room during Apollo 11, which happened about a decade into her career at NASA. 

While she had been working diligently behind the scenes for years, the recognition that came with being in that all-important seat made a big difference in her professional career. 

Mosquitoes

Touching on the subject of harassment, Morgan also told the story of how a supervisor once “whacked” her on the back and told her that women were not allowed to be in the room that she had been instructed to work in. She later encountered that same man while she sat working in the firing room. 

Morgan said that she encountered “everything from obscene phone calls to men following me in the stairwell … like mosquitoes,” she said. “We had a lot of mosquitoes.”

“Poppy” Northcutt

Northcutt, who calculated the return-to-Earth trajectories for Apollo, followed Morgan’s inspiring words, saying that no one ever told her she couldn’t be there, except, of course, society as a whole. “I guess I didn’t really appropriately get the message,” she joked. 

Telling the crowd about her vastly different entrance into the world of human spaceflight, Northcutt said that, “unlike JoAnn, I did not have this big plan to be in the space program.”

After receiving her degree in mathematics from the University of Texas, “I found a job as a ‘computress’ — that really was the job title!” she said, eliciting surprised giggles from the audience. She worked in this role at TRW Systems, a contractor for NASA.

“I thought, a gendered computer? What is this? I had never heard such a title before in my life,” she said, referencing the term “computer” which was used in the film “Hidden Figures” and additionally in “World War Two, when women were used as cypher-breakers. They too were called computers or computresses.”

“Get used to it!”

In addition to this almost funny detail, Northcutt, whose work was used on all of the Apollo missions and who is also an attorney and an activist for women’s healthcare and rights today, touched on the very real sexism that she and others faced at NASA in the 1960s. 

Northcutt told one particular story of how, while working in the control center during Apollo 11, she noticed everyone on the communication line kept talking about a certain video channel. Finally curious enough to check it out, Northcutt switched to the channel and realized that there was a camera pointing only at her while she was working. 

“I didn’t say anything about it. We didn’t even know the term ‘sexual harassment’ … and there’s two different ways to think about that. One is that it’s a little voyeuristic on the part of the dudes watching you as it is harassing and uncomfortable. But the other way to think about it is, ‘so let ’em look and let em all know. Let everybody who’s not in this damn room know. There’s a woman here. I’m here, get used to it!’”

Carolyn Leach Huntoon

“I think I was pretty fortunate,” Huntoon, who began her career at NASA (at what was then called the “Manned Space Center” Huntoon noted) as a medical researcher, said about sexual harassment at NASA. 

Huntoon was a trailblazer not only as a woman in science and in leadership positions, but also in the incredible work that she did. Before taking on incredible leadership roles at the agency, she conducted some of the earliest scientific experiments examining how spaceflight affects human health. Her work was and continues to be an important and critical part of human spaceflight. 

“Personally,” she said, “I had people say unpleasant things to me … but … I outlasted those people … they retired, they died,” she said.

Looking to the future

Early in the talk, Northcutt said something to the audience that seemed to sum up the tone and message of the talk and stick with people as they looked on, awestruck by this panel of accomplished scientists, engineers and leaders. 

“People think that we are inspirations. I am inspired by you. And I hope that you will not be hidden figures. I hope you will be out and about and screaming your names to encourage other women,” Northcutt said.

Read the full text of this article, originally published by USA News Hub.

Sunday’s World Cup victory for the U.S. women’s national soccer team was entirely due to the hard work and talent of the players on the field. But long before they were born, civil rights advocates and legislators were hard at work clearing their path to success.

Passed by Congress nearly 50 years ago, Title IX prohibited educational institutions receiving federal funding from discrimination based on gender. The legislation ensured the right of students to learn in an environment free from sexual harassment, and guaranteed pregnant and parenting teens breastfeeding accommodations. But the best-known feature of Title IX was its requirement of equal athletic opportunities for girls and boys.

This was a novel concept in the 1970s, and it did not go unchallenged. Lawsuits were filed by the NCAA and others demanding exemptions from the athletic provision. Their arguments hinged on an assumption that girls were not as interested in sports as boys, so schools should not be required to hire coaches to serve them or provide equal practice space. But judges determined — and history has shown — that the argument was simply untrue. When sports are made available to girls, they embrace them. The year Title IX was passed, there were 700 girls playing soccer on high school teams, according to a participation survey of the National Federation of High School Assns.; today, there are 390,000.

At roughly the same time the U.S. was passing Title IX, women’s rights movements around the world were succeeding in lifting bans on women’s soccer leagues. Several countries — including England, Brazil and Germany — had barred women from the sport on the premise that playing soccer could damage their ability to bear children. While eliminating the prohibitions was a step forward, this alone was not enough to generate an influx of young athletes; the sport was technically allowed but with limited investment, participation was anemic.

The U.S. took a different tack, and it reverberates in the world of women’s soccer today. Title IX didn’t merely allow women to play; it required opportunities be made available to them.

And the players poured in.

Between the year Title IX was passed (1972) and the first Women’s World Cup (1991), the sport saw a 17,000% increase in U.S. girls playing on high school soccer teams, according to the National Federation of High School Assns.

Some of these girls have grown up to be among the finest athletes in the world, and they are now in position to demand another kind of gender parity: pay equality.

Twenty-eight members of the U.S. Women’s National Team have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation alleging they are paid less than their male counterparts, despite doing the same work (and despite their impressive record of four World Cup championships and four Olympic gold medals).

Read the full text of this article, originally published by the Los Angeles Times.

During the Obama Administration, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights warned colleges and universities that, if they did not take further measures to prevent and remedy sexual violence among students, they could lose their federal funding. In a “Dear Colleague” letter sent in 2011 to more than seven thousand schools, the O.C.R. provided guidance on how to avoid such a punishment. Although the letter was not legally binding, and contained few very clear instructions, the agency posted a shame list of schools that were under investigation for noncompliance with Title IX, the law, passed in 1972, that prohibits sex discrimination at federally funded institutions. At a gathering of college administrators at Dartmouth, in 2014, the assistant secretary for civil rights, Catherine Lhamon, said, “Do not think it’s an empty threat.”

Universities reacted with panicked overcompliance: in renewing their attention to the rights of alleged victims of sexual assault, many began to disregard the rights of accused students. In recent years, it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses. At many schools, including Middlebury College and the University of Pennsylvania, investigators and adjudicators have been trained to “start by believing” the complainant rather than to start from a position of neutrality. According to K. C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on Title IX lawsuits, more than four hundred students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011 have sued their schools under federal or state laws—in many cases, for sex discrimination under Title IX. While many of the lawsuits are still ongoing, nearly half of the students who have sued have won favorable court rulings or have settled with the schools.

From the start, the Trump Administration seized on Title IX as an area in which to reverse the Obama Administration’s positions. Under Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education has rescinded more than twenty Obama-era policy guidelines on anti-discrimination laws, including ones that protected transgender students from discrimination and allowed them to use gender-segregated facilities of their choice. It has also cancelled policies that supported schools’ use of affirmative action, outlined disabled students’ rights, and attempted to curb racial disparities in elementary and secondary schools, based on research showing that minority students are punished for misconduct at higher rates than their behavior warrants. These revocations have rightly provoked concern that DeVos is turning her back on vulnerable students.

Read the full text of this article, originally published by the New Yorker.