Part of it is the specific imprecision created by classification — the deliberate removal of the most technically specific parts of the record.

And part of it is the imprecision created by the same institutional dynamics that made women’s contributions to aerospace invisible during the period she worked: the default attribution to teams, programs, and male colleagues rather than to individual women.

What the numbers that can be counted show is a career of unusual duration, unusual technical depth, and unusual range.

Thirty-one years is a long time to stay in one of the most technically demanding environments in American industry — particularly for someone who, by every social expectation of the period, should not have been there at all.

Staying that long, rising through the levels of technical responsibility that her work implies, is not consistent with someone who was doing marginal or purely supportive work.