If you’re in the know, you might have heard about NASA’s New Horizon’s mission to Pluto. If you’re really in the know, you may have heard about the strikingly large number of women involved with the mission.
How many women, you might ask? Maybe enough to make up the whole team — or at least a majority? Well, maybe eventually we’ll get to that point. In this case, though, all the hype is due to the fact that a staggering 25% of the people on the mission are female. To scientist Fran Bagenal — who worked as the particles and plasma science team leader for the mission — the number didn’t seem very large, and as she stated in an interview, “This isn’t so remarkable — it’s just how it is.”
However, compared to how many women have been involved in previous NASA missions and how many are in STEM careers as a whole, the numbers really are remarkable. Women make up only about 15% to 20% of NASA’s astrophysicists and engineers; and, although participation in STEM fields has increased dramatically in the last few decades, significant disparities have remained in engineering and the physical sciences. Given these statistics and the scarcity of women involved with previous NASA missions, 25% starts to seem pretty impressive.
The New Horizons mission itself — which began on January 19, 2006 — is NASA’s first mission to Pluto. It was launched just several months before Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in August of 2006. The mission involved a space probe called New Horizons, which flew by Pluto last month on July 14th, gathering so much data that it will take over a year for it to download back on Earth.
Alice Bowman, the Mission Operations Manager (MOM), doesn’t see the mission’s number of women as shocking either. She said that when “somebody says, ‘Oh, look at the mix of diversity on your team,’ it’s something that I don’t see unless someone points it out.” However, she’s the first ever female MOM at John Hopkins’ Applied Science Laboratory. During the mission, her role was to take charge of the Mission Operations Center, painstakingly checking lines of code and ensuring that the mission went smoothly.
Other women heavily involved in the mission include Tiffany Finley — who worked as the science operation team manager — and Yanping Guo, the mission design leader who designed the spacecraft trajectory — a job with a very narrow margin for success. A total of 38 team members were women.
There are plenty of reasons for the disparity between the number of men and women in STEM fields. Even in the same positions as men, women are often paid less, given fewer grants, and taken less seriously than their male counterparts. Women who have children are more likely to leave their fields early in a career; according to one study, being both a parent and a scientist is made difficult by inflexible working hours and a workplace environment that “penalizes people who need the flexibility to, say, pick up their kids from day care.” From a young age all the way to higher education, girls are not as often encouraged as boys to pursue science and math classes.
We can only hope that the New Horizons mission will open up some new horizons in empowerment as younger girls look up to the scientists who worked on it. Who knows? At this rate, NASA might eventually have a mission worked by a majority of women!