The culture of engineering and aerospace was almost entirely male.

The major programs — Mercury, Gemini, Apollo on the NASA side; the various missile and reconnaissance programs on the defense side — were staffed predominantly by men, led predominantly by men, and documented in ways that reflected a world in which the default engineer was assumed to be male and the exceptional woman in the field was noted as exceptional rather than incorporated into the standard narrative.

Women who worked in aerospace during this period were often doing mathematically sophisticated work that was credited to the team, the program, or the department rather than to them individually.

The problem has been documented extensively in the context of the Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA Langley — the “Hidden Figures” of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, whose contributions to spaceflight calculations were invisible for decades before being systematically recovered by historians.