Women at NASA
Women at NASA highlights the scientists, engineers, managers, flight controllers, and astronauts whose work has shaped the United States civil space program from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics era to the present, with their roles and contributions varying significantly over time. Women entered NASA in the 1920s as technical specialists, including physicist Pearl I. Young, the first woman hired as a professional employee at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1922, and expanded in the 1940s to large pools of "human computers" who performed critical aeronautical and astronautical calculations by hand at Langley and other facilities.