Breaking Hollywood Stereotypes

The entire film redresses traditional stereotypes as it was fairly uncommon for women, especially of color, to serve any leadership roles. The actual events of the story took place in the 1960’s; however, the movie that recreated the narrative was released in 2016. In the raw events of the storyline, it was extremely rare at the time to see any woman serving amongst men to be seen as their ‘equal’, even more so, seeing a black woman in this position. These gifted Black women served as computers for NASA before technology was able to catch up to them, and programmed machinery that white, intelligent males with years of experience couldn’t even fathom. The brilliance of Black women is often minimized to an extent conveying mistaken unidimensionality. It is not often that we see powerful colored women out-perform their privileged peers in STEM careers. This movie creates a powerful representation as it amplifies the destruction of female and racist stereotypes. Although this was a huge win for black women, there is only so much more to achieve. Hidden Figures successfully captured the plight of the women who were unseen trailblazers in STEM fields and elegantly deconstructed the falsely perceived homogeneity of their careers.