The Upside of Career Restlessness

In 2010, Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of Hidden Figures, was sitting in her parents’ home, catching up with her dad about some of his co-workers at NASA Langley Research Center, many of whom were black female scientists. “Why haven’t I heard this story before?” Shetterly’s husband asked.

It was then that she realized there were probably many people who didn’t realize the crucial role that women—and black women in particular—played in the early days of American space exploration. Not long after that, she wrote a book, , about the first African American women at ; it won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and was adapted into an