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When Katherine Johnson began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1953, she was classified as “subprofessional,” not far outranking a secretary or janitor.

Her honors degree in mathematics, her time in graduate school, and her years teaching math added up to the very modest job rating of SP-3: a level 3 subprofessional, the entry-level fate of most of the women hired at Langley, regardless of their professional and educational credentials.

Jones never finished college, so when he was hired in 1934, it was as a subprofessional scientific aide, the category that most women fell into.

Over the course of twelve years, Virginia Tucker, the labs Head Computer, had ascended from a subprofessional employee to the most powerful woman at the lab.

Or maybe the moment was an interaction between a professional and a subprofessional, an engineer and a girl.