Hidden Figures: Thriving When You're Underestimated
She Was Not Supposed to Be in That Room
Katherine Johnson walks into the Space Task Group at NASA and every head turns. Not because she is brilliant, though she is. Because nobody expected her. The room full of white male engineers looks at her and sees a problem to manage, not a colleague to learn from.
If you have ever walked into a conference room, a faculty meeting, or a leadership retreat and felt the weight of being underestimated before you opened your mouth, Hidden Figures is not just a movie. It is a mirror.
The Tax of Being Underestimated
Being underestimated in academic medicine is not just an emotional burden. It is a practical one. It costs time and energy that your peers never have to spend.
Katherine had to prove her competence to people who assumed she did not have it. She had to earn trust that others received by default. She navigated a system that questioned her presence while depending on her output.
Physicians who are underestimated pay the same tax. The faculty member who gets talked over in rounds and hears her idea repeated by someone else five minutes later. The junior attending who is mistaken for a nurse three times before lunch. A 2018 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that Black physicians were significantly more likely than their white peers to report being mistaken for non-physician staff. Being underestimated is not a feeling. It is a documented pattern.
She Did Not Wait for Permission
Here is what strikes me most about Katherine Johnson's approach. She did not wait for the room to accept her. She did not shrink. She sat down and did the math.
When she was told she could not attend the Pentagon briefings where her own calculations were being discussed, she found the argument that would get her in the room: the work would be better if she were there. She made her case on the merits. And she got in.
This is not a story about patience. It is a story about strategic persistence. You cannot control whether people underestimate you. You can control whether their underestimation limits what you actually do.
The Difference Between Proving and Performing
There is a distinction I draw with the faculty I coach. Proving your value and performing your value are not the same thing.
Proving is doing work so strong that the results speak. It is Katherine checking the math and being right, over and over, until the question of whether she belonged became absurd. Performing is the exhausting show you put on to make other people comfortable with your competence. Over-explaining your credentials. Volunteering for extra service work to seem like a team player when your peers do not have to.
Psychologist Derald Wing Sue describes this dynamic in Microaggressions in Everyday Life as the invisible labor of constantly managing others' perceptions. If you are spending more energy performing your value than proving it, something needs to shift. Not in you. In your strategy.
What Katherine's Story Actually Teaches
Katherine Johnson did not succeed because she was twice as good. She was twice as good and she had a strategy. She knew which fights to pick, when to push back, and when to let the work do the talking.
That is coaching territory. Not the talent part. You already have that. The strategy part. A few principles I come back to with the physicians I coach:
- Document everything. Your contributions should be visible and traceable. Do not assume anyone is keeping track for you. They are not.
- Build a board of directors. Not one mentor. A small group of people who see your value and are willing to use their influence on your behalf. Katherine had Al Harrison. You need your own version.
- Choose your proving grounds. You cannot fight every battle. Pick the projects, committees, and collaborations where your contribution will be hardest to overlook. Put your energy there.
The Numbers Did Not Care
At the end of Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson's math is what gets John Glenn home safely. The numbers did not care who calculated them. They were right or they were wrong. And hers were right.
Your work has that same power. But results alone are not always enough when the system is predisposed to underestimate you. You also need a plan for making sure the right people see what you have done and what you are capable of doing next.
If you are navigating academic medicine while carrying that weight, you are not imagining it. And you do not have to figure out the strategy alone. If you'd like to learn more, contact us to schedule a time to chat.
