This is not a conspiracy theory about the aerospace industry.

It is a description of how institutional assumptions work.

They are not usually conscious.

They are usually not malicious.

They are usually just — assumptions.

The water that the fish are swimming in, invisible because it is everywhere.

The result, for someone like Mary Ross, was that even when her work was recognized as good — and the accounts from colleagues indicate it was — the recognition existed within a framework that categorized her as exceptional rather than typical, as someone who had managed to do the work despite being who she was rather than as someone who was exactly what an engineer looked like in a specific person.

That difference — between being recognized as exceptional and being seen as typical — is not trivial.