Getting girls to space
Astronaut Sally K. Ride’s legacy is encouraging young women to embrace science and engineering.
ON June 18, 1983, 35 years ago, Sally K. Ride became the first American woman to launch into space, riding the Space Shuttle STS-7 flight with four other crew members.
Only five years earlier, in 1978, she had been selected to the first class of 35 astronauts – including six women – who would fly on the Space Shuttle.
Much has happened in the intervening years.
During the span of three decades, the shuttles flew 135 times, carrying hundreds of American and international astronauts into space before they were retired in 2011. The International Space Station began to fly in 1998 and has been continuously occupied since 2001, orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes. More than 50 women have now flown into space, most of them Americans. One of these women, Dr Peggy Whitson, became chief of the Astronaut Office and holds the American record for number of hours in space.
The Space Shuttle was an amazing flight vehicle: It launched like a rocket into Low Earth Orbit in only eight minutes, and landed softly like a glider after its mission. What is not well known is that the Space Shuttle was an equaliser and enabler, opening up space exploration to a wider population of people from planet Earth.
This inclusive approach began in 1972 when Congress and the president approved the Space Shuttle budget and contract. Spacesuits, seats and all crew equipment were initially designed for a larger range of sizes to fit all body types, and the waste management system was modified for females.
I graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Washington in 1971 and, by 1976, I was a young engineer working on the first Space Shuttle, Columbia, with Rockwell International at Edwards Air Force Base, in California. I helped to design and produce the thermal protection system – those heat resistant ceramic tiles – which allowed the shuttle to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere for up to 100 flights.
In the 1970s there were visionary men and women in NASA, government and in the general public, who saw a future for more women in science and engineering, and for flying into space.
Women were not beating down the door to be included in the Space Shuttle programme, we were being invited to be an integral part of a larger grand design for exploring space.
The selection process for the first class of Space Shuttle astronauts, to include women, opened in 1977.
Her passion was science
Ride learned about NASA’s astronaut recruitment drive through an announcement, possibly on a job bulletin board, somewhere at Stanford University. She had been a talented nationally ranked tennis player, but her passion was physics. The opportunity to fly into space intrigued her.
Ride and I arrived at NASA in 1978 – she as part of the “TFNG” (“Thirty-Five New Guys”) astronaut class and I as a newly minted mission controller, training to support the Space Shuttle. I had already been in the aerospace industry for several years and had made my choice for “space” at the age of nine on a cattle ranch in Washington state.
Ride and I often discussed our perspectives on career selection, and how fortunate we were to have teachers and parents and other mentors who encouraged us to study math and science in school – the enabling subjects for becoming an astronaut.
Although Ride was one of six women in the 1978 class, she preferred to be considered one of 35 new astronauts – and to be judged by merit, not gender. It was important to all the women that the bar be as high as it was for the men. In an emergency, there are no special allowances for gender or ethnicity: Everyone had to pull their own weight.
Ride and I frequently discussed why so few young girls were entering into math, technology, science and engineering – which became known as STEM careers in the late 1990s. Both of us had been encouraged and pushed by male and female mentors and “cheerleaders”. By 1972, companies with federal contracts were actively recruiting women engineers. NASA had opened up spaceflight to women in 1978, and recruiting and training women as astronauts and employing them in engineering and the sciences.
National needs for STEM talent and supportive employment laws were creating an environment such that if a young woman wished to become an aerospace engineer, a physicist, a chemist, a medical doctor, an astronomer or an astrophysicist, they could.
One might have thought that Ride’s legendary flight, and those of other women astronauts over the last 35 years might have inspired a wave of young women (and men) into STEM careers. For example, when Ride flew into space in 1983, a 12-year-old girl back then would now be 47. If she had a daughter, that daughter might be 25. After two generations, we might have expected that there would be a large wave of young energised women entering into the STEM careers. But this hasn’t happened.
Rather, we have a growing national shortage of engineers and research scientists in this nation, which threatens our prosperity and national security. The numbers of women graduating in engineering grew from 1% in 1971 to about 20% in 35 years. But women make up 50% of the population, so there is room for growth.
Root causes of stagnation
Many reports have cited deficient K-12 math and science education as contributing to the relatively stagnant graduation rates in STEM careers.
Completing four years of math in high school, as well as physics, chemistry and biology is correlated with later success in science, mathematics and engineering in college. Without this preparation, career options are reduced significantly.
Too many schools now struggle to find qualified mathematics and physics teachers. Inspiring an interest in these topics is key to retention and success.
Participation in “informal science education” at museums and camps is instrumental for recruiting students into STEM careers.
Research has shown that middle school is a critical period for young boys and girls to establish their attitudes toward math and science, to acquire fundamental skills that form the basis for progression into algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and to develop positive attitudes toward the pursuit of STEM careers.
When Ride retired from NASA, she understood this, and founded Imaginary Lines and, later, Sally Ride Science, to influence career aspirations for middle school girls. She hosted science camps throughout the nation, exposing young women and their parents to a variety of STEM career options. Sally Ride Science continues its outreach through the University of California at San Diego.
However, there are still challenges, especially in this social media-steeped society. I and other practising women engineers have observed that young girls are often influenced by what they perceive “society thinks” of them.
In a recent discussion with an all-girl robotics team competing at NASA, I asked the high school girls if they had support from teachers and parents, and they all said “yes”. But then, they asked, “Why doesn’t society support us?” They directed me to the Internet where searches on engineering careers returned a story after story of describing “hostile work environments”.
Sadly, most of these stories are very old and are often from studies with very small populations. The positive news, from companies, government, universities and such organisations as the National Academy of Engineers, Physics Girl and Society of Women Engineers, rarely rises to the top of the search results. Currently, companies and laboratories in the United States are desperate to employ STEM qualified and inspired women. But many of our young women continue to “opt out”.
Young women are influenced by the media images they see every day. We continue to see decades-old negative stereotypes and poor images of engineers and scientists on television programmes and in the movies. Popular TV celebrities continue to boast on air that they either didn’t like math or struggled with it.
Sally Ride Science helps to combat misconceptions and dispel myths by bringing practising scientists and engineers directly to the students. But this programme and others like it require help from media organisations.
The nation depends on technology and science, but social media, TV hosts, writers and movie script developers rarely reflect this reality.
The reality? More companies than ever are creating family-friendly work environments and competing for female talent. In fact, there is a higher demand from business, government and graduate schools in the United States for women engineers and scientists than can be met by the universities.
Both Ride and I had wonderful careers supported by both men and women. NASA was a great work environment and continues to be – the last two astronaut classes have been about 50% female.
I think that Ride, who passed away from cancer in 2012, would be proud of how far the nation has come with respect to women in space, but would also want us to focus on the future challenges for recruiting more women into science and engineering, and to reignite the passion for exploring space. – The Conversation/AP