Fifty-six years after the first woman went into space (and 56 years to the day after the first cat did so, but that’s another story), two remarkable Americans Friday performed the first all-female spacewalk, an uplifting achievement that will, we hope, point more girls’ eyes toward the skies, literal and metaphorical.
NASA’s 2013 class of astronauts, from which pioneers Christina Koch and Jessica Meir both hail, was half women and half men, just like the human race. But the agency’s overall workforce is dominated by men.
Some sex disparities in science, technology and engineering, especially in the upper echelons of management, are to be expected given existing pipelines for advancement. But going forward, there’s no cause to accept them as just the way of the world. Especially not as tech jobs become ever more central to the world economy.
Progress worth celebrating: Columbia’s exemplary engineering school is half female. At Cornell Tech, the great new innovation hub on Roosevelt Island, four in 10 master’s students are women, which is also the ratio of students NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.
Still, sometimes subtle but stubborn cultural biases tell far too many girls who might otherwise be turned onto the sciences that they’re not cut out for it. Fewer than 1% of women who go to college graduate with degrees in tech-related disciplines, compared to 6% of men. While women hold nearly half of all U.S. jobs, they hold just 24% of jobs in science, technology, engineering and math.
The answer, of course, is rigorous education that breaks through cultural barriers and reminds girls that one’s interest in or aptitude writing software, doing research, crunching numbers or hurtling into the black zero-gravity void has no relationship to one’s chromosomes.
Praise the women up in space today. And do more down here on Earth to prepare the women of tomorrow to join them.
