Ignoring Half Of The Artemis Generation At NASA Armstrong

1. It isn’t just about lack of women…

   1. It’s hard to say based on faces in a picture. I do agree that five of the nine people in the image are pretty obviously of European descent. Two seem to be of asian descent. One might be southern European or hispanic. And the guy in the green checkered shirt might be descended from people from almost half the world. But, yes, there is something missing. Africa is a pretty big place, and about 13% of the US population have ancestors from there. 13% of nine people ought to be about one.

      1. I guess you’ve missed the progress in the application of DNA to anthropology over the last couple of decades. We _all_ come from Africa originally, brother.

         1. No, I’m quite aware of that, but it’s been a long time. Culturally, I have essentially no connections to Africa (the only local languages I can speak were imported in the past couple centuries…) I’m not even sure where I come from. Colorado (where I live)? Washington D.C. (where I was born)? Scotland? (The first Crary in America moved from there, but that was 360 years ago, so calling myself a Scot would be pushing it.) Somewhere else (where did the celts come from?) Africa? That would be a long time ago. I can’t put down “African American” on a census form because of a multi-million-year old genetic tie.

   2. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a
      nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” -MLK

      1. Nice that you can remember that quote. However, the real world isn’t there just yet. Especially when it’s well proven that hiring managers will tend to hire clones of themselves. Or the old boy networks are still in place.

         1. Dr. King’s speech did mention his children, implying his dream might come true in a generation. But dreams usually don’t work out on schedule. I hate to say it, but the more realistic phrasing in that speech was, “One day on the red hills of Georgia son of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” The unfortunate part is that “one day” wasn’t within a generation, or even half a century. The American Republic definitely isn’t perfect. But we have to keep trying.

2. I’m not sure about the intern programs, but the fellowships for post-docs I’m familiar with generally require a NASA employee as a sponsor (or, at least, the odds of being selected greatly benefit from such a sponsor.)

   That said, an important fact is that people like people who are like themselves. There is a tendency to sponsor someone who is “just like me when I was that age.” Unfortunately, that means an unconscious bias towards people with the same educational, economic, ethnic and religious background. And towards people of the same gender. That’s the sort of bias that’s hard to remove, because no one actually thinks they are discriminating on inappropriate grounds. It’s just an unconscious tendency, and a pervasive one, unless people actually stop and think about what they are doing.

3. I wonder what SpaceX’s intern program looks like ?

   1. Not much different.

      1. I’m not shocked. I’m not sure about ethnic minorities, but when it comes to women, I’m not surprised and I doubt there is anything overt about it. SpaceX has a reputation for working people hard and expecting long hours. I’d have to hunt up studies to prove it, but my impression is that women tend to like having a life and a bit less willing to take 80-hour a week jobs than men.

         Working for someone who said he says he rarely sleeps more than four hours a day might not be appealing. It certainly wouldn’t be for me, but I may be in the minority for my gender. Most gender issues aren’t a 100/0% thing, more like a 60/40% thing.

4. This picture is definitely not good, but it would be even more interesting to see the overall EEO stats on the internship program. I assume they would be available through the NASA PAO.

5. When likely 90-95% of applicants are probably male, it’s no surprise. Women are more than capable of getting these positions. A vast majority choose other things. There were just a few women in my mechanical engineering class of 100 or so. Is that the school’s fault? No.

   The twitter replies are absurd. Only 13% of ME grads in 2015 were women. I’d imagine the other branches of engineering are similar or worse.

   1. Actually, if 90-95% of the applicants are male, it might be the school’s (or program’s) fault. When people decide to apply (or not apply) for a job, they do ask themselves things like, “Is this somewhere I’d want to work?” and “Is this someone I’d want to work for?” If a whole lot of qualified women answer those questions with a no, then something might be wrong with the institution and its work environment.

      1. You might want to look at the environment women grow up in and understand how that likely more heavily influences a woman’s career choice than anything you’ve mentioned. Or just keep it simple and blame THE MAN! That’s much easier on the mind.

         1. Oh like we need your advice on what influences women based on your comments. You have made your point.You are part of the problem. Bye.

         2. That’s an odd comment, since I didn’t specifically mention any factors, and you haven’t specified the “environment women grow up in.” But, if you want specifics…

            Internships and university support for graduate student research assistants are chronically poor on many things. Parental leave is often non-existent. My own university just upped it from zero to six week per parent after a child is born. That’s still inadequate in my mind, but I guess something is better than nothing. This is an issue women consider when deciding if they are interested in a job.

            Medical coverage is also, in general, quite poor. And this is an issue which women, statistically, care about more than men (especially young men.) So that’s another way an institution can unintentionally discourage women without being overtly sexist.

            Looking at my professional colleagues, I also notice that many of them think fighting is the right way to solve professional differences. Many people think being rude and verbally aggressive is the right way to settle differences. If there is a theory or idea you don’t like, some people think the right thing to do is ridicule it and also ridicule anyone who likes that idea. A classic example is something a critic said about Stephen Jay Gould and colleague’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium” evolution. Another scientist in the field, who hated the idea, famously described it as “evolution by jerks.” Many people thought that was a clever phrase, since it could either be a description of the theory or his opinion of its authors.

            Even people who don’t act that way accept others who do, saying that, “that’s just how he is, and he is a really prominent scientist.” It’s actually abusive harassment. That, again, is a way of doing things which men are (statistically and according to a number of studies) more comfortably with than women. That does _not_ mean all men feel one way and all women feel the other way. It’s more like a 40/60 versus a 60/40 split.

            As far as blame, I think that’s a petty complaint. As a future dead, white male, I refuse to accept blame for this mess. I did not create the benefits system or the professional culture. I have essentially zero control of the benefits system at my institution, and when I complain about the professional culture, I’m lucky if five people actually listen and think about what I say. So I do get offended when people imply it’s my fault because of my gender and ethnic background. But I am more than willing to admit that there is a problem, and we need to do something about it.

   2. How do you know that “90-95% of applicants are probably male”?

      1. We don’t, but those sort of statistics are common for similar programs. But that isn’t an answer. It just raises the question of _why_ there is a gender disparity in applicants. And what we can and should do to correct it.

6. Unfortunately, I can count. Unless I’m mistaken, only 13 out of 52 people in that group photo are women. That can only be called good in comparison to the abysmal standards of the field as a whole. And someone arranged to have most of the women compose almost all of the front row. That strikes me as fraud and tokenism. And I’m willing to bet those women deserve better. (Showing actual data to scientists is, by the way, a bad way to mislead them.)

   Could we actually try to be inclusive, instead of composing photos to make it look like we are? I know Keith and I disagree about using a X to Y chromosome count as a figure of merit, but we at least agree that there is a problem and it needs to be solved. Not hidden and not prettied up with carefully constructed photos. Why not actually be inclusive and let the random statistics decide who is in the front row of a photo? That would give both the important result and the desired image.

7. I don’t see how this is off topic. We frequently (incessantly) discuss how NASA is or is not efficient. If there aren’t any women in a group of nine interns (obvious by the photo) NASA is not tapping 50% of the talent pool. That’s inefficient, even ignoring the ethical issues. So that’s on topic for this forum. It’s also obvious from the photo that none of those nine people are African Americans, so let’s toss out another 13% of the talent pool.

   I know using the statistics of small numbers can be misleading, but in planetary science, that’s often all you have. No women out of a group of nine, if they were randomly selected, means less than one in four as a whole (at the 90% confidence level). That might not be definitive, but it’s certainly a sign of a possible problem. And worth discussing, since there are plenty of other signs of this problem.

8. Well, the data (such as it is) shows eight or nine women in the front row, essentially the entire front row, when there are thirteen women out of fifty two people in the photo. I’ll admit my professional training is to make the most out of sparse data, but that’s taught me to be suspicious of unlikely coincidences. I’m pretty sure something other than random chance put all those women in the front row of that picture. The odds of that happening by accident are just too low for me to believe it. A likely conclusion (although not absolutely certain) is that someone wanted the picture to look good and imply more diversity that was actually present. That’s why I used words like fraud and tokenism. If there is more evidence I’m unaware of, I’d be happy to hear about it and reconsider my opinion.

   [Later edit] More bad data. Some of my head count on that photo was from a cropped image. While what I wrote is qualitatively correct, the numbers are slightly off. There are, for example, two men in the front row, and one person who looks sufficiently androgynous to make a guess at gender inappropriate. But it is correct to say the front row is almost entirely female while the group as a whole is not.

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