-
Asked by spacefan226 to Andrea, Charlie 🚀, Col Op, Kirsty, Vinita on 20 Jun 2016.
-
Kirsty Lindsay answered on 20 Jun 2016:
I think that women are interested in space just as much as men, but in our parents generation women where not encouraged to be scientists or engineers, so there just weren’t that many women working in the space field until a few years ago- but there certainly have been women involved in the whole history of spaceflight!
Now we are in a society that encourages girls and women to enter STEM ( Science Technology Engineering and Maths) fields, so there is a growing number of women working in these areas.
-
-
Andrea Boyd answered on 20 Jun 2016:
I have no idea. It’s the most awesome field! I never considered that being a girl could be a reason to not do space engineering.
And in 10ish years working in Mining and Aerospace (I’m older than I look plus I started work/study pretty early) I have never had an issue in the workplace due to being a girl – there’s no discrimination in engineering. People just care if you can get the job done.
When I talk to primary school students they just ask me about work and astronauts and space. When I talk to high school students they ask me a bit about that but mostly questions about what’s it like being a girl/female/woman engineer (answer: it’s the same as being an engineer but you get asked that question 😉 ) so something happens in middle school where students have stereotypes from older people and TV and they notice all the ‘girl science initiatives’ and think oh maybe it’s not normal. Get rid of the prefixes I reckon. In the modern western world there is no reason or barrier stopping people doing whatever career they want.
Comments
Andrea commented on :
BTW – A few years ago I was on a panel discussing “Women from developing countries in Aerospace” at the IAC (think Olympics of the space world), I represented Australia. Participants from Iran, China, South Africa, Uruguay and Georgia, chaired by a female engineer from Spain, all had the same experience: gender is no longer an issue in our workplace. Engineering is about results where work performance is evaluated on merit alone. It turned out that NASA’s first female engineer was also present in the audience: delighted to meet a generation of young women for whom space engineering was just another everyday career choice.
spacefan226 commented on :
Wow, this is all so interesting 😉 do you think this runs a risk of going the other way of having too many women and not enough men in a few years time?
Andrea commented on :
Um… I don’t know. The pink and the blue stereotypes are still pretty bad and so it’s up to the next generation of parents to not limit their children. There are about 50% men and 50% women in the world so my best guess is it would be about an even ratio eventually? But at work like I said above, I’ve found that these sorts of things have nothing to do with your job and really don’t matter 🙂