The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ready for a giant leap
Despite high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority at NASA.
At NASA, 2019 could be called the year of the woman. In October, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir completed the first all-female spacewalk. Koch also is on her way toward 328 days aboard the International Space Station — the longest single space mission by a woman. Meanwhile, NASA is planning a lunar mission called “Artemis,” named after the twin sister of Apollo, which, the agency says, would put “the next man and the first woman on the moon” by 2024. The aerospace industry also boasts an unprecedented number of women in highranking positions, including Leanne Caret, who leads Boeing’s defense and space division, and Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX.
But for all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and in the wider industry. Women make up only about a third of NASA’s workforce. They comprise just 28% of senior executive leadership positions and are only 16% of senior scientific employees, according to a survey done by the agency.
In the aerospace industry, only 24% of employees are women, and there has been little change in years, according to a study done by Aviation Week.
For many, another example of how far the agency has to go came just a few weeks ago when NASA announced its “honor awards,” what it calls its “highest form of recognition” to employees and contractors.
In total, 42 people were honored. All but two were men.
“We haven’t moved very much in the last 30 years in overall diversity,” said Mary Lynne Dittmar, the president and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry group. “Aerospace is still heavily male and white, and we’re not moving very quickly.”
Though perhaps not as overt as the early days of the space agency, when women were “hidden figures,” sexism persists in an industry long dominated by white men. That has led women to leave science and engineering jobs at rates higher than their male counterparts. Women still struggle to get a foothold in the industry and often find themselves the only women in meetings dominated by men. Or being asked to fetch coffee. Or being called “honey.”
“That’s Dr. Honey to you, and the coffee machine is down the hall and to the right,” is how Dittmar, who has worked in senior positions at Boeing and as an adviser to NASA, responds.
“Frankly, those attitudes have gotten better but they haven’t completely gone away,” said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum who previously served as NASA’s chief scientist. “To pretend they have does not help us understand why women get paid 80 cents on the dollar and are still only making up 16 to 30% of the workforce.”
While the aerospace industry hasn’t been swept up in the recent #MeToo movement, it has over the years been hit by the occasional high-profile scandal. In 2012, Lockheed Martin’s incoming CEO was forced out because of an affair with a subordinate, and in 2010, Boeing settled a pair of lawsuits filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging sex discrimination.
In one, two female engineers said they were subjected to sexist remarks and then suffered retaliation when they complained. In the other, a female employee alleged that her male counterparts harassed her and broke her tools, making it harder for her to do her job.
The employee reported the behavior, the EEOC said at the time, “but the company did nothing to address it. As a result, the harassment continued.”
At NASA, which has about 17,000 employees, there were 62 EEOC complaints last year, 27 of which were on the basis of sex, according to agency statistics.
While that is not a large number, EEOC spokeswoman Christine Nazer said “it can be (a) difficult decision for individuals to come forward to file a charge of discrimination with the EEOC. Employees often fear retaliation such as being fired or demoted if they assert their legal rights. Indeed, retaliation is the most frequently filed charge with the EEOC.”
Major corporations such as Boeing and Lockheed say that they go to great lengths to ensure that all employees are welcomed and that they have robust programs to prevent harassment and to protect those who do report it.
Women in the industry acknowledge some improvement in the way they are treated, but cultural change has been slow. Even a term such as “manned spaceflight” continues to be controversial.
In the early 2000s, NASA’s style guide was updated to include a section urging that “all references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic, as opposed to manned or unmanned).”
The word “manned” should only be used, the style guide said, when referring to any “historical program name or official title that included ‘manned.’”
During an interview with reporters from the International
Space Station about the first all-female spacewalk, Koch said she was happy to see the term fading from use. “It’s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,” she said.
But debate still surrounds it. In October, a chat board for members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 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.”
That incensed Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, who 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 the organization decided to shut down the discussion board, asking members to write statements “with empathy and respect for your fellow members.”
It wasn’t until 1978, nearly two decades after John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury Seven had been chosen to go to space, that NASA selected its first female astronauts — six of a class of 35. One of those was Sally Ride, who five years later would become the first American woman in space.
Kathy Sullivan was a part of that class and said NASA was welcoming to the women. “Very open and evenhanded,” she said. Then again, “walking in the door of NASA with the title of astronaut is like walking around the Navy with the title of admiral.”
If they were accepted inside NASA, the rest of society was adjusting.
A reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times posed what he conceded “may seem like a male chauvinist pig question” when he asked about Shannon Lucid’s fitness for space given that she “has three children and from her age I gather that the children are rather young.”
Did NASA give any consideration “to her responsibilities to her children versus her responsibilities to the program?”
“If I gave you a one-word answer to Shannon Lucid’s family situation, the answer is, ‘none,’ ” Chris Kraft, the legendary NASA flight director, responded.
Rather, he said “the most rewarding thing was that we found that there are a large number of very highly qualified women in the United States that can make the qualifications that we set out as astronauts.”
Still, there were embarrassing moments, as the male-dominated agency adjusted.
Before her first flight, the engineers asked Ride how many tampons she would need for her week-long mission.
“Is 100 the right number?” they asked, according to her biographer, Ann Friedman.
“That would not be the right number,” she responded.
In many ways, the NASA astronaut class of 2013 was typical: full of overachievers, the best of the best, chosen from more than 6,000 applicants. The group of eight all had the right stuff, and more — six military officers, two scientists. Typical except for one detail: For the first time, there were as many women as men.
Jim Bridenstine, NASA’s administrator, said the agency is making great strides in hiring and promoting women, and he pointed out that three of the agency’s four science mission directorates now are led by women.
“We’re making significant progress in this area and have been for a number of years,” he said. “We’re not done. There’s a lot more to do.” And he said events like the all-female spacewalk last month are “what inspires tomorrow’s astronauts, and we want tomorrow’s astronauts to represent all of America.”
It’s not just at NASA. Several major aerospace firms have women in top leadership positions. Marillyn Hewson is the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne’s CEO is Eileen Drake.
But for more women to get to the C-suite, many think more opportunities should be available to women earlier in life. That’s why Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, started a fellowship for undergraduate women that places them at aerospace companies across the country.
The program has graduated 114 women over three years, creating a support group of women who can talk about the difficulties of breaking into an industry where women have long faced discrimination.