It wasn't just that a woman was the lead software engineer (a term Margaret Hamilton coined, btw, in an effort to gain some well-deserved respect from the hardware folks), but the programming team was woman-dominated.
I have read a couple of books about Apollo but had never heard about her, (or for that matter the role of any women in the Apollo program) so I decided to look her up. From her Wikipedia page, I learned that Margaret Hamilton was director of software for Apollo & Skylab and that her software compensated for hardware alarms that were coming up during the final landing phase of Apollo 11.
The strange thing is that I can barely find her anywhere else. And what I did find was odd.
I have Gene Kranz's book "Failure is not an Option" at home. Looking through the 20 pictures in the middle of the book, there is not a single woman in any of them, except for Gene's wife in one photo. Hamilton is not listed in the index, nor did I find her mentioned during Gene's description of the alarms that happened during Apollo 11's landing.
In addition, when I searched for a description of the landing sequence, I found an article by Don Eyles (
http://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html) about the Lunar Module Guidance Computer, which doesn't mention Margaret Hamilton at all, or even the word "women". Don has a picture showing some of the people involved in writing this software--and not a single woman in sight.
Don instead gives credit to a person named Hal Laning for writing the software. Hal Laning has a wikipedia page, which describes some of the same work that Margaret's page does, but neither mentions the other person.
Has Margaret's role in history, and that of other women in STEM, been diminished, or is there something else going on?
