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Commercialization

Yet Another Space Conference With Few Female Speakers

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 10, 2017

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

38 responses to “Yet Another Space Conference With Few Female Speakers”

  1. Tim Franta says:
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    As Nichelle Nichols said forty years ago at a National Space Society meeting to NASA, “Where are my people.” That comment led to NASA truly seeking diversity in the astronaut corps. A year after that comment there were women, African Americans and an Asian in the corps. ISPCS and the industry needs to make a conscious effort not just for diversity of people but of thought and talent. With all due respect, many of us can give each other’s speeches.

    • kcowing says:
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      She was on our bus with my boss Jerry Brown as we rode to see the STS-1 launch in 1981. So I cannot argue with you on this point.

  2. Eric says:
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    Two weeks ago at the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh NASA put on a presentation called “Women In Space: Redefining Glamour”. They are trying to encourage girls to look at careers in space. The audience was mostly adults with just a few girls mixed in. For the whole airshow, the vast majority of attendees were male. The vast majority of children there were male. I talked with a young woman who had recently earned her pilot’s license and was working on her instrument rating. She said everyone she was running into was very supportive of what she wanted to do. She just was a rarity. Maybe it’s as simple as not as many women are interested in aerospace.

    I get a chance to talk with quite a few young people and I often ask them about their career goals. I rarely hear girls say they are interested in careers in technology of any kind. When I do, I nave given them advice on which universities might best fit their dreams and how to succeed there.

    You can only encourage people to do something so much. You really can’t and shouldn’t push people into something if they don’t want to do it. Life’s too short to pick a career you won’t be happy in. The opportunity and encouragement should be there for those that want and need it. Any unfair roadblocks should be removed. Then let the numbers fall where ever they may.

    • DJBREIT says:
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      Well said!

    • kcowing says:
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      “I rarely hear girls say they are interested in careers in technology of any kind.” Really? That’s not my experience – in fact it is quite the opposite.

      • Eric says:
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        I run into lots of young people of both genders through youth sports. I hear lots of guys say they want to become engineers, software developers, etc. I rarely hear girls out of these groups say that. Where do you hear from young people?

        • kcowing says:
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          What do you mean “where do I hear from young people”? I hear from them in all modes of communication in a variety of places other than just sports – and I have been doing so for decades.

          • Eric says:
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            What I was getting at is that high school sports reflects a pretty good cross section of college bound kids. Do you mostly hear from kids who already have a strong interest in technology? That skews the base you’re starting with if you’re doing a statistical distribution of interest compared to the general population.

            One of the best engineering schools around where I live the graduates are around 95 percent male. I’ve been in literally hundreds of engineering departments around the country and they are overwhelmingly male. I went to the University of Wisconsin and the engineering undergrads are still overwhelmingly male. The numbers have shifted since I graduated in a class of 178 mechanical engineers that included only 2 females, but not to anywhere near fifty fifty. I see that reflects what I see in high school athletes telling me what they want to do for careers. The University of Wisconsin has a significant program in place to recruit women and minorities into engineering. I’ve talked with people in these recruiting programs and they tell me they hear the same things that I hear from high school students. Given all this, the numbers are not a mystery to me.

          • kcowing says:
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            High School sports does not represent everyone. Not even close.

          • J Fincannon says:
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            I agree with Keith. Speaking as a high school nerd, I wasn’t too fond of “high school sports”. Of course, there were the “all-star” students who were experts at sports and academics. But usually one specialized in either academics (especially advanced placement courses) or sports (and band/music).

          • Eric says:
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            You’re right. High school athletes do significantly better in academics than non-athletes. Here’s the study to prove it:

            https://www.iahsaa.org/reso

            A nice quote from the abstract: “The results of every academic success category demonstrated student-athletes achieving greater than non-
            athlete.”

            National high school average GPA

            Athletes: 3.01
            Non-Athletes: 2.72

            My 15 year old niece is a prime example. She and most of her AAU and high school basketball teammates are well above average students. Yet not one has an interest in a career in technology of any kind.

            When I was a student at UW-Madison the athletic dept. students had a higher GPA than the student body average in every school on campus. The five year graduation rate for the athletic dept. was 91 percent compared to 57 percent for the general population. I don’t know of any of my teammates in college that didn’t graduate. There are exceptions, but everything I’ve ever read and personal experience reflect what this study says.

          • kcowing says:
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            And where was this published? Did it get peer reviewed? I’m sorry but I went to college with a lot of smart people and none of them were athletes. I taught college level chemistry and biology classes and there were no jocks there except for the 101 level classes that everyone had to take. I could just Google and point to an article that refutes your link – like this “Why Student Athletes Continue To Fail” http://time.com/3827196/why

          • Eric says:
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            Then i guess you don’t want to read the following studies:

            University of Connecticut study

            http://digitalcommons.uconn

            University of Kansas Study

            https://news.ku.edu/2014/01

            South Dakota State Study

            http://openprairie.sdstate….

            Florida National University

            http://www.fnu.edu/the-link

            Northwest Missouri State Study

            http://www.nwmissouri.edu/l

            At UW-Madison you don’t have to look far for athletes who have done extremely well academically

            One of the best football players in school history (1960 UW athlete of the year) is Dr. Gerald Kulcinski current director of the Fusion Technology Institute. He also developed the world’s only working Helium 3 fusion reactor. He used to serve on NASA’s advisory council.

            https://directory.engr.wisc

            Dr. Eric Rice founder of Orbitec

            https://sbirsource.com/sbir

            http://www.orbitec.com/comp

            Don Davey graduated with a 4.0 in Mechanical Engineering worked on his masters while playing for the Green Bay Packers

            https://www.si.com/vault/19

            There are many more I know that you wouldn’t.

            There are examples from other schools:

            Sally Ride was a good college tennis player

            Leland Melvin was with the Detroit Lions before he became an astronaut
            http://www.lelandmelvin.com/

            Some scientists who were athletes
            Carl Sagan: high school basketball team captain – he liked to go shoot hoops often

            Neils Bohr: Olympic silver medal in soccer (a family friend was a close friend of his and had played soccer with him. He said Neils Bohr was one of the best athletes in the world in his day)

            Enrico Fermi: Tennis
            Edwin Hubble: professional basketball player (Chicago Maroons)

            Buzz Aldrin: high school football
            Meredith Gourdine: Olympic silver in long jump
            Rosalind Franklin (a pioneer in DNA research): high school tennis
            Preston Cloud: Golden gloves champion
            Ivan Pavlov: Gorodoki (a Russian sport) he also owned a dog

            Ernest Rutherford: college rugby University of Canterbury (modern nuclear physics just wouldn’t be the same without him)

          • kcowing says:
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            Have you read them? Or is this just Googling?

          • Eric says:
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            The first time I read a study like these was maybe thirty years ago. They mostly all come to the same conclusion and have so ever since. Google didn’t exist back then. Before the internet existed, people like me would read scientific journals of all kinds. I started reading Scientific American regularly when I was in seventh grade. Nature was soon added to my reading list. You’d be amazed at the journals my junior high school library had. My high school had an even better collection. JAMA was one of my favorites. Psychology Today has had articles on the effects of athletics on academic performance every now and then for decades. l sucked up every scientific journal in every branch of science I could.So thanks for asking if I was just googling. Your prejudice is showing. And by the way I’ve been going through the articles in the list. They say mostly the same thing other studies have said for decades.

          • kcowing says:
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            Your prejudice is blatantly obvious. You have made your point. Next.

          • fcrary says:
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            Antidotal evidence aside, that study isn’t too convincing. First, it isn’t at all clear to me that a 0.29 difference in GPAs is statistically significant. Worse, this is all about correlations, and that’s one of the most difficult things to interpret. There have been joke studies showing that people who wear leather jackets are more likely to die in motorcycle accidents and that there is a correlation between child birth in (if memory serves) the Netherlands and the number of storks in the country. You can get that sort of thing when some third factor causes the two things you are considering. (Bonus points for anyone who can identify the third factor with the stork thing.)

            There are all sorts of potential biases in that the author doesn’t even mention, let alone control for. Where the students all taking equally difficult courses? A GPA of 4.0 from someone taking remedial courses can’t really be compared to a GPA of 2.5 from someone taking advanced placement courses. Were the schools involved actively helping athletes in their studies? At the college level, schools frequently provide free tutoring for star athletes. I’m not sure, but I suspect something similar happens at the high school level as well. I could go on, but you see the point. You can’t do meaningful social statistics without considering, and controlling for, all sorts of things like that.

          • fcrary says:
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            I think it’s a fair question. But perhaps not too clearly phrased. Consider the selection bias involved in “youth sports” versus some STEM-related events. The STEM-related connections basically pre-filter for young people with some interest in science or engineering. A sports event does not (or, possibly, a bias in the opposite direction.) So I think it’s fair to ask about the context.

        • Susan Keddie says:
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          You have already lost the girls by highschool… my 11 year old daughter was with us when her sister was touring colleges. Out of the blue, she asked the tour guide “do you have engineering here?”. I don’t know if she even knows what engineering IS. But she has been doing STEM camps for a couple summers now and has been doing “experiments” since forever. It will be interesting to see how middle school goes. The outside pressures on young girls to “not be too smart” and to “buy toys from the pink aisle”, and the assumptions that they don’t like or can’t do math continue. Any interest is often taken away from them by high school…

  3. Mark Friedenbach says:
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    I feel she is the best person of any gender, race or creed for the job, then sure of course.

  4. dbooker says:
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    So what is the pre-determined quota?

  5. Vladislaw says:
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    It starts at home .. she gets a barbie and he gets a lego building set with all the new high tech bells and whistles…

    When my first was born, a daughter, a nurse told me something that stuck with me forever, she said when your kid comes to you because the chain fell off their bike don’t approach it like this …

    A boy comes in and tells dad his chain fell off his bike and dad doesn’t even bother to look up from the newspaper, he simply says “the tools are out in the garage, fix it”

    A girl comes in and tells dad her chain fell off her bike and dad immediately shuts the paper and gets up and says “don’t worry princess I will take care of it”

    That stuck with me and so both my daughter and later my son were FORCED to learn to be tool users .. both mechanically and in the garden. They both had to grow a garden and fix anything mechanical if they could …

    • unfunded_dreams says:
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      I agree -The first question my 5 year old asks when I say I have to work a launch is whether it’s a land-landing or boat. She gets really annoyed when the boosters are expended. For a while, she wanted to teach the Atlas 5 to land on a boat when she grew up. Now she wants to be a superhero. I don’t need her to become an engineer, but I want it to be in her tradespace.

  6. Alfredo Menendez says:
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    As Americans are we not free to choose what areas of life we want to participate in? Really, counting men and women attendees??? Why all the fuss about not enough women or people of particular ethnicity. When spaceflight becomes common we won’t be making these dumb comments about how many of they or them. Spaceflight is not interesting to all people, face it. Once we do accept “to each their own” maybe we can proceed and go on to the planets. And by the way I became interested in space fllght as a kid in of all places Cuba! I was blessed to come here and be motivated by the things that the US was doing in the early 60s. Let’s move beyond measuring the x or y chromosome.

    • fcrary says:
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      The “free to choose” argument would work, if it weren’t for things like elementary school teachers telling pupils that “girls aren’t good at math” or toy companies selling dolls which say things like “math is hard” and “lets go shopping.” That’s much, much less common that it used to be, but it still isn’t unheard of. Rather than simply thinking in terms of people being free to choose, it’s important to think about social pressures which subtly (or not so subtly) bias those choices.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        Or grandparents that steer your kids towards “gender appropriate” toys. Sorry grandparents, but the toys that are appropriate for today’s kids are the toys they want to play with, not what someone two generations removed thinks is “appropriate”.

  7. ThomasLMatula says:
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    I find it interesting all this speculation is by men. Where are the women posters? For that matter where are the women blogging on space? It would be good to hear their opinions on it…

    • BlueMoon says:
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      Yeah, where are they? I assume NASAWatch readership is 51% female, since that’s the female percentage of the human population.

      • kcowing says:
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        I have always assumed that the NASAWatch audience reflects society as a whole since I have zero data to the contrary.

        • fcrary says:
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          Keith,
          Let’s be realistic. If the NASAWatch audience reflected society as a whole, NASA’s budget would be closer to fifty billion per year rather than fifteen.

          The demographics would actually be interesting, although I know the data don’t exist. We know (or have statistics on) about diversity among people who work in space-related fields. But the NASAWatch audience probably reflects people who are _interested_ in the subject, regardless of what they do for a living. I suspect that would be a more diverse group.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          The readers perhaps, but the posters appear to be mostly male, especially among those comfortable enough to post their name. Of the 34 current posts here at the moment I only see two from women.

          I am also trying hard to think of a successful space blog/website run by a women. Perhaps someone here might recall one. The only one I am familiar with is at the Society for Women in Engineering, but its not really a dedicated space blog.

          http://alltogether.swe.org/

          This I see as especially interesting as women are more likely than men to do blogs.

          https://www.theatlantic.com

          I am not trying to start an argument, just pointing how deep rooted this problem is. Anyone is able to set up a space blog or post to a space blog, yet there appear to be few women doing so. Why? What are the barriers keeping them from doing so?

          • BlueMoon says:
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            Why do you assume (or expect) there are “barriers” to women setting-up and/or posting to space blogs?

          • kcowing says:
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            What “barriers” are you talking about? You get a DISQUS account or other ID and post comments?

  8. Jeff2Space says:
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    There are pushes to make STEM more appealing for kids like visual (beginning) programming languages like Scratch and hardware like the Raspberry Pi. I got my youngest daughter a first generation Raspberry Pi the first year they came out and she loved programming in Scratch, so at least she knows what a programming language is and understands the concepts, even if she doesn’t become a computer programmer as a career.