Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 98% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

NASA evolved from few women engineers to having female center directors

Dr. Christine Darden · a16z Podcast | From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM · Jan 2, 2019 · at 20:48

Dr. Christine Darden, pioneer NASA aeronautical engineer and early leader, discusses the demographic shift and growth of female leadership at NASA over her 40-year career.

0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Well, by the time I left, we had seen far more women coming into the, coming to the system, and though we had had, in the intermediate times, we had had some female supervisors that had difficulty managing men who did not particularly like to work for women, by the time I left, we actually had a center director who was female.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Dr. Christine Darden

Assertion Supported
NASA placed male math grads in engineering and females in support
“Why is it that the men coming here with the same background I had, degrees in mathematics or applied mathematics, Were put in engineering sections and able to work on their own projects and write their own papers, and the females are put into computer sections…”
Dr. Christine Darden Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:47 a16z Podcast | From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM
Insight
Profitable commercial supersonic flight requires overland routes
“The lesson actually became if you're really gonna have a profitable supersonic airplane, it really needs to have some overland roots.”
Dr. Christine Darden Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:46 a16z Podcast | From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM
Assertion Not checkable as stated
U.S. companies must hire overseas due to domestic engineering shortages
“We need all of the engineers that are in school now who are not taking those math and science courses, those who have the capability to be engineers to keep our country ahead, to fill the jobs in this country that all of these companies need, and they're havin…”
Dr. Christine Darden Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:44 a16z Podcast | From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM
Assertion Supported
NASA engineering sections had no female supervisors in the late 1960s
“There were no women supervisors to say, maybe in human resources in some of those offices, but in the engineering sections, the women were typically the secretaries or the computers that were supporting some of the groups.”
Dr. Christine Darden Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:17 a16z Podcast | From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Male engineers educated alongside women had better attitudes at NASA
“As I was there longer, and you began to see the young engineers come in who had been in school with women in engineering, their attitude was entirely different over working with women.”
Dr. Christine Darden Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:10 a16z Podcast | From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dr. Darden went five years without promotion before NASA engineering transfer
“And I got transferred to an engineering section. I got a promotion because I hadn't had a promotion in five years. And in that riff list, I was actually being bumped by somebody hired at the same time who had gotten promoted twice.”
Dr. Christine Darden Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:35 a16z Podcast | From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.