New Scientist - July 27, 2019

27 July 2019 | New Scientist | 41

imagine things you can’t see,” she says. This

rings true for Coleman, who didn’t consider

working as an astronaut until Sally Ride visited

her college to speak. “I just thought, wow, she

seems like me,” says Coleman. “And maybe

that means that if I worked really hard at this,

I could do this too.”

Once Coleman arrived at NASA, she received

direct support from Kathryn Sullivan, who had

been the first US woman to do a spacewalk.

She told Coleman that being an astronaut

didn’t mean giving up on having a family.

“I think there’s really a huge, enormous value

in having people that you can identify with,”

says Coleman.

Getting more women in space means more

women need to apply, says Auñón-Chancellor,

and that requires more women to feel that

becoming an astronaut is within their reach.

“I think a lot of women believe they aren’t

qualified enough, and that’s just inherent

cultural beliefs,” she says. “We need more

women to try.”

We will know that we have really arrived

at equality when women, like men, don’t

have to be extraordinary in order to become

engineers and scientists, says Coleman.

Until then, she says, “if they’re not incredible

superstars, women are still considered to be

not satisfactory”. ❚

obtaining physical science ones were women.

But for engineering, that number dropped to

20 per cent.

Additionally, NASA requires three years

of experience in academia or 1000 hours at

the controls of a jet aircraft. According to the

International Society of Women Airline Pilots,

only 5 per cent of the pilots at 34 major airlines

in the US are women. Back in the 1960s, it was

even worse: the first astronaut candidates

had to be test pilots, roles that were off limits

to women in the US military.

With similar barriers to entry in existence

elsewhere in the world, it is small wonder that

women make up a mere 10 per cent of all space

travellers. But after decades of disparity, the

situation finally appears to be improving. The

Canadian Space Agency’s most recent intake

consisted of one man and one woman, and

NASA accepted five men and seven women

in its most recent class.

This increased diversity is enormously

important, says Jackson. “It’s very hard to

Abigail Beall is a freelance

writer based in Leeds, UK

That being said, she supports NASA’s
freedom to choose the right astronauts for
the spacewalk. This year’s planned all-female
line-up, for example, was a fluke of scheduling
rather than NASA having explicitly picked
the candidates only because of their gender.
“I can’t speak for others, but I would be insulted
if they did,” says Coleman. Others agree that
the system is ruthlessly meritocratic. “Once
you get in the corps, you’re treated the same
across the board,” says NASA astronaut Serena
Auñón-Chancellor, who came back from
her latest role as flight engineer on the ISS in
December 2018. “Nothing is altered because
you’re a man or a woman – whether it’s an
exam on space station systems or an exam
on how to do spacewalks in the pool, which
is a very physically demanding task.”

Level launchpad

But the barriers to equal representation in
space start long before you get to the ISS, says
Libby Jackson, author of A Galaxy of Her Own,
a book telling the stories of women in space.
“One of the barriers is society saying to young
people that there are boys’ jobs and girls’ jobs,”
she says. Being an astronaut is seen to be a
boys’ job, says Jackson.
NASA requires all astronaut candidates
to have a bachelor’s degree in biology,
mathematics, physical sciences or engineering.
According to the US Department of Education,
for all bachelor’s degrees earned in 2015,
43 per cent of students getting mathematics
and statistics degrees and 38 per cent

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The final frontier

Women have always been a minority in space travel, but the situation is slowly improving

First woman in space,

16 June 1963

First US woman

in space,

18 June 1983

First British woman

in space,

18 May 1991

First woman of

colour in space,

12 September 1992

First woman to pilot a

shuttle, 3 February 1995

First woman to command

a shuttle, 23 July 1999

First woman to fly

on a space station,

August 1982

First woman to perform a

spacewalk, 25 July 1984

Valentina Tereshkova Sally Ride Helen Sharman Mae Jemison Eileen Collins

First Chinese

woman in space,

16 June 2012

Svetlana Savitskaya Liu Yang

Female astronauts Male astronauts

SOURCE: SOVFOTO/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES: SPUTNIK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO: NASA: GAGARIN RESEARCH & TEST COSMONAUT TRAINING CENTER: TKSTEVEN/CC BY 3.0

“ Increased diversity

is enormously

important. It’s hard

to imagine things

you can’t see”