Hidden Figures and the Invisible Labor That Keeps Institutions Running
Somebody Had to Check the Math
Before John Glenn would get into the spacecraft, he asked for Katherine Johnson. Not the IBM machine. Not the team of engineers who had signed off on the trajectory. Katherine. "Get the girl to check the numbers," he said. "If she says the numbers are good, I'm ready to go."
That scene in Hidden Figures gives me chills every time. Not because of the drama. Because of what it reveals. The most critical work at NASA — the work an astronaut's life depended on — was being done by someone most people in the building did not know by name.
The Work That Holds Everything Together
I coach faculty in academic medicine. And I see a version of this story play out in every institution I touch.
There is always someone who keeps the residency program from falling apart. Someone who mentors every junior faculty member who walks through the door. Someone who rewrites the curriculum, mediates the conflicts, sits on five committees, and answers emails at midnight — not because it is in their job description, but because if they stopped, things would break.
This is invisible labor. And academic medicine runs on it.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild named this category of effort back in 1983 in The Managed Heart. She called it emotional labor. The concept has expanded since then, but the core insight holds: institutions depend on an enormous amount of work they refuse to formally recognize. Mentoring. Committee service. Curriculum development. Conflict resolution. The emotional work of caring for trainees who are struggling.
A 2022 study in Academic Medicine found that faculty who took on the most institutional service work — particularly women and underrepresented minorities — were the least likely to be promoted on time. The reward for doing invisible work was falling behind the people who did not do it.
Dorothy Vaughan Saw It Coming
One of the most underappreciated storylines in Hidden Figures belongs to Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer. Dorothy sees the IBM computer arriving and understands her entire team is about to become obsolete. Nobody tells her. Nobody offers retraining. She teaches herself FORTRAN, then teaches her whole team, and makes them indispensable to the new system.
She did not get a promotion for it. She got the satisfaction of keeping her people employed — and eventually, after fighting for it, the supervisor title she had been doing the work of for years.
This is the invisible labor trap. You do the work. The institution benefits. And when it comes time for credit, the institution looks the other way.
Why Leaders Need to Name It
If you lead a department or division, invisible labor is not just a fairness problem. It is a strategy problem. Here is why:
- It predicts burnout. Faculty carrying disproportionate service and emotional labor burn out faster. You lose your best institutional citizens first because nobody is protecting their time.
- It distorts your incentive structure. If promotions reward publications and grants but ignore mentoring and service, you are telling faculty exactly what not to prioritize. Then you wonder why nobody volunteers for the curriculum committee.
- It concentrates on the people least able to say no. Research consistently shows that women and faculty from underrepresented groups are asked to do more service work and feel less able to decline. This is a distribution-of-labor problem.
Three Things That Actually Help
Make it visible. You cannot reward what you cannot see. Audit who is doing what — not just the work that shows up in annual reviews, but the hallway mentoring, the crisis management, the coordination that makes the visible work possible. Write it down.
Count it. If service and mentoring matter, build them into your promotion criteria with real weight. Not a checkbox. Actual metrics that affect actual decisions. The University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine has done this by incorporating educational and service scholarship into promotion pathways. It can be done.
Redistribute it. Stop relying on volunteerism for essential institutional functions. Assign service work equitably. Rotate committee leadership. If someone is doing the work of a role they do not hold, give them the role — and the compensation.
She Checked the Numbers
Katherine Johnson checked the math because she was the best person to do it. The institution needed her. The astronaut knew it. And for a long time, almost nobody else acknowledged it.
The invisible labor in your department is holding things together right now. Somebody is checking the numbers, mentoring the struggling resident, smoothing over the conflict that almost derailed the faculty meeting. The question is whether you see it. And whether you are willing to do something about it.
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