Women in space
Women have flown and worked in outer space since almost the beginning of human spaceflight. A number of women from a range of countries have worked in space, though overall women are still significantly less often chosen to go to space than men, and in June 2020, constituted only 12% of all astronauts who had been to space. Yet, the proportion of women among space travelers has been increasing substantially over time.
Women were not qualified as space pilots and workers co-equal to their male counterparts until 1982. By October 2021, most of the 70 women who have been to space have been United States citizens, with missions on the Space Shuttle and on the International Space Station. Other countries have flown one, two or three women in human spaceflight programs. Additionally one woman of dual Iranian-US citizenship has participated as a tourist on a US spaceflight.
The first woman to fly in space was Soviet Valentina Tereshkova, aboard the Vostok 6 space capsule on June 16–19, 1963. Tereshkova was a textile-factory assembly worker, rather than a pilot like the male cosmonauts flying at the time, chosen for propaganda value, her devotion to the Communist Party, and her years of experience in sport parachuting, which she used on landing after ejecting from her capsule.
Women face many of the same physical and psychological difficulties of spaceflight as men. Scientific studies generally show no particular adverse effect from short space missions. It has even been suggested by some that women might be better suited for longer space missions. Studies have continually indicated that the main obstacle for women to go to space remains gender discrimination.
History
Early Space Race struggle
In the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States known as the Space Race, both nations chose their first space pilots in the late 1950s and early 1960s from the ranks of their military high-speed jet test pilots, who were exclusively men.Image:JerrieCobb MercuryCapsule.jpg|thumb|upright|Jerrie Cobb with a Mercury capsule
In 1959, after their research project Woman in Space Earliest of the Air Force Air Research and Development Command was not permitted, Don Flickinger and William Randolph Lovelace II subsequently formed a group of thirteen women US pilots, dubbed by the American press as the "Mercury 13". Wanting the chance to become astronauts the women took and passed the health screening tests as the men, supervised by Lovelace Clinic staff. This was funded privately and not by the government; the idea of female astronauts faced a great deal of resistance in the military command and NASA, leaving these women no chance of becoming astronauts. Jerrie Cobb of the "Mercury 13" became a consultant to NASA in 1961 and testified before Congress in July 1962 about the "Mercury 13"'s positive medical results and gender discrimination.
Meanwhile, the USSR's director of cosmonaut training, Nikolai Kamanin, lobbied for having women as cosmonauts, after being inspired in 1961 by repeated questions from the foreign press about women in space. Subsequently, Kamanin crucially gained space program leader Sergey Korolev as a supporter, getting approval six months later for women cosmonauts. During a visit to the US in 1962 Kamanin got to know Jerrie Cobb of the then rejected "Mercury 13". At one point Kamanin noted in his diary, "We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women." The Soviet government generally had no interest in using women as cosmonaut pilots, but Premier Nikita Khrushchev was extremely interested in the propaganda value of proving Soviet superiority over the US in women's equality. In February 1962 from over 400 applicants a group of five female cosmonauts were chosen to be trained for a solo spaceflight in a Vostok spacecraft.
To increase the odds of sending a Soviet woman into space first, the women cosmonauts began their training before the men.
First Woman in Space
The first woman to fly in space was Valentina Tereshkova, a textile factory worker who was an avid amateur parachutist, as parachuting was necessary for the Earth landing which was made outside the reentry capsule.Tereshkova flew aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, completing a 70.8 hour flight making a total of 48 orbits before returning to Earth.
Kamanin framed her as "Gagarin in a skirt". Tereshkova married Vostok 3 cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev on November 3, 1963, at the Moscow Wedding Palace, with Khrushchev presiding at the wedding party together with top government and space program leaders. The occasion was described by Kamanin as "probably useful for politics and science". Tereshkova gave birth on 8 June 1964, nearly one year after her space flight, to the first person with a mother and father who had both traveled into space, their daughter Elena Andrianovna Nikolaeva-Tereshkova.
Further female missions cancelled
Kamanin hoped to fly two other women on the Voskhod 3 and 4 flights, despite the opposition of Yuri Gagarin and the other male cosmonauts. These plans were canceled in 1965, leaving the women with Soviet Air Force officer commissions.The American Apollo program to land a man on the Moon included only male astronauts. Neither the USSR nor US launched another woman into space until women were admitted to the astronaut and cosmonaut corps in the late 1970s.
Later Space Race advances
By 1971 NASA had hired staff tasked to address issues of adhering to legal ramifications to include underrepresented people of society. In 1973 staff such as Ruth Bates Harris criticized NASA's poor inclusion of women and minorities. Subsequently, the NASA Astronaut Group 8 was to include women and people of minorities. To assist finding candidates the milestone Star Trek star Nichelle Nichols was hired, after she spoke at the National Space Institute for the inclusion of women and minorities as astronauts.On January 16, 1978, NASA announced the selection of its eighth group of astronaut candidates, which included the first women, six Mission specialists : Anna L. Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judith A. Resnik, Sally K. Ride, Margaret Rhea Seddon, and Kathryn D. Sullivan.
Similarly, in 1978 Tereshkova and her colleague Tatyana Kuznetsova pushed for a new cosmonaut program for women, with the USSR in July 1980 choosing a cosmonaut group which included nine women in addition to four men. The women were: Svetlana Savitskaya, Galina Amelkina, Yelena Dobrokvashina, Larisa Pozharskaya, Tamara Zakharova, Yekaterina Ivanova, Natalya Kuleshova, Irina Pronina, and Irina Latysheva.
Of the nine women only Savitskaya got to fly to space. As a research cosmonaut she flew aboard the Soyuz T-7 to the space station Salyut 7 in August 1982.
Savitskaya became the first woman to fly in space twice, on the Soyuz T-12 mission on July 25, 1984 and became the first woman to walk in space outside the Salyut 7 space station on that mission.
Of NASA's first women astronaut group all flew in space at least once, with mission specialist Sally Ride becoming in 1983 the first US woman to fly in space, with the seventh Space Shuttle mission, and third woman altogether to fly in space.
After the Space Race
Since the final years of the Space Race most of the women who have been to space have been American women, outnumbering all other countries combined. But the more than 50 American women astronauts, contrasted by the several hundred astronauts who have entered space, women still only make up about 12% of all people who have gone to space, still being less chosen and enabled. NASA only in 2013 enabled the first time an equal number of women as part of an astronaut class, the NASA Astronaut Group 21, a short lived situation since the subsequently and current Group 22 has yet again a lower number.File:Mae Jemison - Flickr - NASA on The Commons.jpg|thumb|Mae Jemison, the first woman of color in space, aboard STS-47 in 1992
Advancements
In 1992 Mae Jemison became the first woman of color in space. Susan Helms became the first woman on an ISS expedition crew on Expedition 2, lasting from March 2001 until August 2001. Peggy Whitson became in 2007 the first woman to command the International Space Station, and in October 2009 NASA's first female Chief of the Astronaut Office.On October 18, 2019, the first all female spacewalk was conducted by Jessica Meir and Christina Koch.
Future
Only 12 human beings, all men, have walked on the Moon. In 2020, NASA's communication director reported that NASA planned to land astronauts on the Moon, including possibly a woman astronaut or astronauts, as part of the U.S. Artemis program. Of the 18 candidates in the Artemis program, nine are women: Nicole Aunapu Mann, Kayla Barron, Christina Koch, Kate Rubins, Stephanie Wilson, Jessica Meir, Jasmin Moghbeli, Anne McClain and Jessica Watkins. Furthermore, the European Space Agency has six astronauts, of whom one is a woman, training for Artemis. This group is later to be joined by members of the 2022 European Space Agency Astronaut Group, which includes two women,, plus history's first parastronaut.In April 2023 NASA, together with the Canadian Space Agency, announced their selection of the Artemis II crew, the first since the Apollo program to go around the Moon. The crew will include Christina Koch.
Discrimination
Space programs allowed women generally only well into the space age, with NASA opening its space program in 1976. When Sally Ride became the first female US astronaut to go into space in 1983, the press asked her questions about her reproductive organs and whether she would cry if things went wrong on the job.Women with children have also been faced with questions about how they would compare to traditional expectations of motherhood. Shannon Lucid, one of the first group of female US astronauts, remembers questions by the press on how her children would handle her being a mother in space. Women are often expected to be the ones mainly responsible for child-rearing, which can impact their career.
According to the historian Kim McQuaid the American space agency NASA ignored gender issues at the beginning of the space era, and women were not normally allowed to enter technical schools or undergraduate/graduate training in engineering and the physical sciences until changes started happening in the end of the 1960s. Particularly in the period between 1972 and 1974 the focus on women became more prominent. In 1967, NASA changed its policy to make it easier for women to join and 17 women applied for the role to join a space travel mission, but all 17 job applications were declined. NASA did employ thousands of women in jobs where space travel was not included in the 1960s, but there was still hierarchical differences between women and men. The women employed in the space agency NASA are also still more likely to work in lower-ranked jobs, while men are more often employed in higher-ranked occupations, particularly in space crew settings, despite women having similar qualifications to those of men. There has also been found a larger gender gap in certain jobs such as manufacturing, while downstream application and service jobs have a higher representation of women employees.
In 2023, numbers released by UNOOSA showed that only 11 percent of the world's astronauts are women, 6.6 percent are spacewalkers and 20 percent are in the space workforce. In March 2023, the Director of Space Technology of the Australian Space Agency, Katherine Bennell-Pegg, said that women are still in the minority in the space industry and that ‘STEM is for everyone’ whilst adding that inclusivity is important. The UN Sustainable Development Goals suggests that an increase of women being involved in the space industry is important to achieve the SDGs and gender equality, since 90 percent of future jobs will probably require STEM related skills. The promotion of space technology in an inclusive manner is also an important step towards achieving the SDG 5B. In 2022, the American astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann, who studied mechanical engineering at Stanford University and also has military combat background in Iraq and Afghanistan, became the first Native American woman in space and she went on the International Space Station. On the 2023 International Women's Day, Mann stated that "inequality does stifle success" and that it is important to continue to break barriers and inspire and empower the youth to achieve their dreams.
In 1995, an academic journal stated that outer space occupations was regarded as a male dominated arena where the male body was the standard while the female body was seen as ‘contamination’ or uncertainty in an otherwise stable environment, and women have previously said that they have struggled to be taken seriously in outer space environments. Some women in the space industry have also reported that they feel like they have to express typically masculine traits like assertiveness and dominance in outer space occupations, since 'feminine' traits are looked down upon. For example, men are thought to be more rational, which is beneficial in the space industry, while femininity is associated with being emotional which is viewed as 'negative' in the context of outer space travel. The American scientist and former government official Carloyn Huntoon, has previously said in an interview in 2002 that if the women did not behave in the same way as the guys, it would mean that they were not doing the job properly.
Chris Pesterfield, a lecturer at the University of Bristol, has stated that legal and political changes have been made to allow for women to enter outer space occupations, but that these changes do not seem to have been as effective as one might have expected. Pesterfield has argued that the unequal number of women and men in space might be an outcome of the socialisation process, starting already in child years. For example, boys are more often encouraged to have interests in STEM subjects such as technology and science than girls and there may be societal expectations that gender will influence what a person is good at. The OECD found that the majority of women employed by NASA have studied biological sciences, while they are underrepresented in mathematics, physical sciences and engineering. Rebecca Spyke Keiser, who is a special assistant to the NASA administrator for innovation and public-private partnership, has stated that the lack of woman role models in aerospace and physics might also have contributed to the low number of women in space-related work as well as perceptions about women only being good at certain things.
There have been attempts at combating gender discrimination within the space sector. For example, the United Nations has made the Space4Women project which is intended to focus on gender related issues in space and find reasons why gender inequality is still an issue in the outer space sector. The project includes women from different backgrounds, professions and countries. One of the mentees in the programme stated that "working for girls and women in science has been empowering, encouraging me to persist in a work environment that is sometimes so hostile and not inclusive". In October 2017, UNOOSA and UN women also cooperated to organise a ‘Space for Women’ Expert Meeting with the goal of empowering women in space industry jobs. Commercial spaceflight and more focus on diversity are also factors that play a role in boosting participation by women.