Diversity At NASA: A Work In Progress
At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency, Washington Post
“But debate still surrounds it. In October, a chat board for members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) hosted a spirited discussion of the term, with some arguing that “manned” refers to all humans and, as one put it, “the word itself has nothing to do with gender.” Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, wrote on the message board that “if we want to encourage women or non-conforming genders to be a part of our next grand adventure, it would serve us well to remove ‘manned’ from our lexicon.” AIAA Executive Director Dan Dumbacher responded on the board that the institute “prefers to use ‘crewed’ or ‘human’ rather than ‘manned’ when referring to space travel in our publications and on AIAA.org. Increasing the diversity of the aerospace community and the future workforce has been — and continues to be — a mission priority for AIAA.” The debate became so heated that ultimately the organization decided to shut down the discussion board, asking members to write statements “with empathy and respect for your fellow members.”
– AIAA Moves Toward Diversity And Inclusion – Old Mindsets Persist, earlier post
– AIAA Responds To Diversity Concerns, earlier post
– AIAA Shuns Gender Diversity In Scholarship Selections, earlier post
One dumbass male program manager can undo the most valient efforts of 100 female engineers that are smarter than he is, which is typically the case.
Exchanging ‘isms’ is not progress.
Let’s not even get into the minority discussion, especially among the engineering and scientist ranks…
It’s actually worth getting into. There’s a planetary scientists with a grant to study diversity and inclusiveness. In August, she gave a presentation which did get into underrepresented minorities. In planetary science, gender diversity has been improving, although it’s still far from what we’d like. But the statistics for underrepresented minorities are bad and flat-lined at bad. There’s no hint of a trend suggesting that’s improving.
Decades ago I was involved in a diversity discussion of a different sort- I’m talking about hiring black people, an issue that has seen huge improvements but is certainly not resolved.
Back in the day, many claimed sufficiently qualified black people simply weren’t available, an argument sometimes true, but also used as a dodge.
I’m bringing it up because I wonder about the experiences in planetary sciences: are qualified women available to fill the positions?
I’d say there are qualified women available for most positions, but that’s slow to change. For something like a tenured professorship, the qualified people were in high school in the 1990s or earlier. So the diversity of that group reflects the diversity of twentieth century high school science programs, not twenty-first ones. Things are much better if you look at undergraduates majoring in physical sciences.
For minorities, I know one issue in the 1990s was that underrepresented minorities are also often historically poor minorities. That can mean attending very substandard public schools, but it can also mean some pressure from friends and family to _not_ go into physical sciences. It doesn’t pay as well as other fields and the career prospects aren’t as good. For someone who was the first person in their family to go to college, there was some pressure to major in things like pre-law, pre-med or engineering, not science. I don’t know if that’s still true today.
I can testify to that pressure. “Be a doctor or a lawyer” came from my parents often. And, even more sadly, teachers and guidance counselors tried to dissuade me from pursuing engineering.
You’ve nailed it, of course; the process starts, not by looking at the current crop of fresh PhDs; the work begins while young women are babes in the arms of encouraging parents.
In my experience, we do see a slow uptick in women hires; but twenty five to thirty years are needed to achieve parity.
And this, from the Department of I Can’t Help Myself:
Young girls on the parental knee must learn that ‘people’ and ‘mankind’ have importantly different connotations.
The critical question is how representative of the pool of talent is NASA? If 30% of the degrees in the engineering are being awarded to women, are the new hires 30% female? If so, NASA is hiring at a rate commensurate with the talent pool. Such data are available – when I worked for a NASA contractor and had hiring responsibility, the HR system would flag jobs for which our female and minority workforce was below the talent pool. We then could use minority status as a tiebreaker. (To use it for anything else would be a violation of federal employment law.)
The contractor also had programs at the university and high school level to encourage STEM as a career.
If the hires and promotions match the talent pool, and it’s still not representative of the population as a whole (50% for women), then we ought to be asking why less than 50% of the people who get engineering degrees are women. The article points to one possibility.
A discussion of diversity “became so heated that ultimately the organization decided to shut down the discussion board, asking members to write statements “with empathy and respect for your fellow members.”” Maybe a significant number of women just don’t want a work environment where things like that can happen, no matter how interested they are in the subject itself.
Diversity invariably heats a discussion, and damn if I know why. I simply can’t see how anyone is opposed to equality of opportunity for all.
And yet, thoughtful folks do stake out a similar position, commenters with long records of thoughtful discussion. I’ve tried to query them, as dispassionately as I can, with little luck, but keep trying.
And I could be wrong. The sentence I wrote above? First draft was “commenters with otherwise long records of thoughtful discussion”.
I emphatically agree with your view that opposing equality of opportunity is not cool, for lack of a better term. But I suspect that that is not what lies at the core of why some otherwise reasonable people appear to do so. It’s not the drive for equal opportunity as much as the forced demand for equality of outcome that troubles some, including me. In a perfect world of opportunity, some will choose to avail themselves of opportunity and some will not. Among those individuals that pursue the opportunity, some will be better qualified than others. To assume that at the end of the day these filters will yield a perfect demographic match for every color of the diversity rainbow in society and in every job category within NASA (or anywhere else), just isn’t credible. Maybe NASA should be 70% female? Level the playing field for sure, but we should accept that outcomes may not always correlate to demographics.
The argument for diversity goes beyond leveling the playing field and simply being fair. But it also isn’t about getting the demographics to match. It’s the idea that diverse groups function better. There are all sorts of trouble a group of like-minded people with the same background and approach to problems can get into. Groups with a good mix of genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, etc. have been shown to preform better.
That said, the same logic means a 50%-50% split in gender may not be as diverse as it seams. If the women involved have been spent their whole careers learning to think and act like their male colleagues, and are hired and promoted because they do, they aren’t contributing to diversity as much as it seems. Similarly, hiring someone who grew up poor and worked his way through college might add more to diversity than someone who went to a ivy league school paid for by his rich parents. And in some cases, that could mean hiring a white male over a woman or an underrepresented minority. That’s one reason the courts insist on affirmative action policies being applied on a case by case basis, not blanked policies applying to everyone member of a demographic group.
I think one reasons the debates get heated, especially in some scientific fields, is because a large part of the problem is unconscious bias. People don’t like to think of themselves as sexist or racist (well, most people…) and their aren’t any secret, smoke-filled rooms where men sit down and conspire to keep women and minorities out of certain professions (well, I suppose there are a few, but it’s not the main problem.)
But people do have all sorts of unconscious prejudices and biases. And, if they don’t admit that to themselves, they do tend to get offended and hostile when people point them out. At the same time, and on the other side of the debate, there are more than enough people who have been treated very poorly and do react strongly to anything which hints of supporting past misbehavior. Even if it’s not intended that way, and the resemblance to past history is superficial and coincidental. That’s a combination which is guaranteed to start nasty arguments and fights.
It’s a complex question. There is no doubt that some STEM fields attract women – Biology degrees are over 50% women. Women are a majority in medical schools in the US. (Those two might be interrelated.) But within medicine, there are some fields that women dominate, and some where they are scarce. Part of it appears to be lifestyle choice – a pediatrician has a much more regular schedule than a trauma surgeon, for example. Part is interest, possibly driven by psychology.
I suggest more closely reading the article. The debate on the comment board wasn’t about ‘diversity’, it was about semantics. Specifically, it was a discussion of the use of the term ‘manned’ and whether or not it should be considered gender neutral in the context of human spaceflight. Without expressing an opinion on the question itself, I can understand how some involved in that debate might have been unable to understand why the semantics were so important to others given the grandiosity of the larger subject of space exploration. One persons ‘big deal’ is another’s triviality. Now that’s diversity for you.
I’d say a discussion of gender-neutral terminology is all about diversity. But that misses my point. That isn’t the sort of thing which would produce such a heated and (apparently) hostile argument. It suggests that people in the field tend to resolve differences by yelling at and insulting each other. In fact, I can think of quite a few people in the field who do think that’s normal and acceptable behavior, and more who think it’s tolerable and forgivable from someone sufficiently senior or talented. That’s the sort of thing which can and has discouraged people from entering the field or driven them out of it. And that response to a hostile work environment is, in fact, gender biased.
Do you want to ride on a launch vehicle built by the best team of engineers, or the most diverse team of engineers?
That is just a stupid comment. Really.
It’s quite likely the diverse team would be the best team. There are plenty of studies showing that diverse groups make better decisions. They aren’t as prone to group think and getting locked into approaching problems in the same way, every time. There is also a greater tendency for someone in a diverse group to raise a point or make a suggestion that no one else thought of.
Of course, I don’t mean for purely technical problems, but those usually aren’t a problem. A diverse group would be no better at something like calculating the terminal velocity of a CST-100 with only two of the three parachutes open. But if (since) that actually happened during an abort test, some group got to decide if the test was successful (the abort part worked fine), if the parachutes system needs to be retested, and if so, how and how many times, etc. Those are the sort of decisions where diverse groups do perform better.
Unless I am mistaken (please correct me) the only people responding to this post are males.
Well, of course, Keith! We are the ones with the problem!