My wife can't think if the office is too hot (63F or higher). I can't think if the office is too hot (65 degrees or higher). My options are to strip off, or go home if the office is too hot. Asking people to wear extra clothing if they're too cold isn't onerous when the people who are too warm have zero recourse.
From the article on the 2015 study: "The authors also note that the model is not always calibrated accurately for women’s summer wardrobes. Dr. van Hoof, who wrote a commentary about the study, observed that many men still wear suits and ties in the summer but many women wear skirts, sandals and other lighter, more skin-baring clothes.""
... wait, so women wear lightweight clothing and that means they need a higher office temperature to be comfortable? Could it possibly be that this is the actual reason for the problem?
Along similar lines, back when the space program started, World War II was in fresh memory, and men were viewed as expendable. No-one was going to stick a woman on top of a rocket and blow her up, or send her into space with the likelihood being that she'd never come back. And at that time? Everyone was fine with that evolutionarily-ingrained decision.
The great thing about that is in retrospect, we can fix all of these. We have to fix all of these to send women into deep space, or even to the moon. And we have to do that as a species. But dwelling on past design decisions is the wronge behavior - fix and move on.
2
Thank you for this article. I’m surprised by the comments deriding it but I guess I shouldn’t be. It’s the same with air conditioning at the office; a few degrees warmer to make women a little more comfortable gets the guys in a tizzy! Sally Ride was my hero as a little girl and as an adult I am all for more women in space. It’s not to lessen the accomplishments of men but just because it’s always been so doesn’t mean there isn’t room for growth. Earthlings, it’s time to make space opportunities equitable.
4
Yeah, we need more women in STEM. Yes, part of it is a funding issue and needs to be addressed, but more so a broad cultural shift, which is harder to do than say, I dunno, taking money from an overblown military budget. Speak a counterpoint to this "woke" article and you get called a misogynist.
NASA underfunding, public disinterest constructed by a culture of increasing poverty desperation from the 1%, lack of STEM programs, our INSANE military budget, that military contractors continuously and without limit (due to Citizens United) pool money into politicians into voting to put even more money into the military budget that it doesn't need, the constant shifting of NASA's goals making the organization woefully and embarrassingly unproductive, are all slices of the pie. Saying that gender inequality is an extremely small slice of that pie isn't "misogynist", it's the hard truth.
1
Why are men so intimidated by women as equals? Patriarchy and religious organizations have been specifically designed to keep women down.
14
@terri smith No one is intimidated. This article is a fallacy though. Its predicated on men being chosen due to sexism and gender bias. In reality, men made up most of the original fighter pilots because WW1/2 fighter planes had no power actuation and strength was a big factor, especially over time. (There were women pilots, but they often didn't fly fighters, and never flew in combat). The mercury program was made up of mostly WW2 pilots, which is why it was designed for men. No sexism needed. The idea that this was a "failure" is ridiculous.
Things have changed now, and that's wonderful. But judging choices made in context as failures because new technologies ALLOW better gender representation? Is absurd.
16
@terri smith
We are not intimidated by women as equals. We are tired of women always playing the victim in order to get more-than-equal power and advantage. For example we have the Violence Against Women Act providing special protections for women even though most violence is against men. Also, because of #metoo, many states are proposing special restrictions on non-disclosure agreements, but only in sexual situations, i.e., in order to protect women.
Women constantly play the victim so that they can get their way.
6
So the most successful period of the US space program was also the most male-dominated? Hmm....
49
The Appollo program was designed by white men for white men.
14
@Peter Schaeffer OK Daenerys, we aren't going to call you Mhysa.
1
Valentina Tereshkova's flight was a bit of stunt because in the Vostok ships the pilot was mainly along for the ride. I believe the controls were actually locked unless a special code was put in.
She also wasn't the first choice. Another trainee by the name of Valentina Ponomaryova was the leading choice. Because she didn't tow the party line about the status of women, Ponomaryova was a feminist, she was bumped from the flight.
9
@Rocket J Squrriel
Most men except once were "along for the ride" for our programs too.
10
“Gender bias” has a fraught meaning in 2019 that simply did not exist when the US space program got under way.
There were no female fighter pilots at the time, so of course the first space suits and other equipment were made to fit men.
Fast forward to 2019, there are female astronauts for whom some of the tools and suits are not, well, suitable. That will be fixed.
Why does the NYT find it necessary to wrap all of its stories in racism, sexism and all the other -isms?
72
@Mon Ray
One of the Mercury requirements was that you had to have Top Secret clearance. None of the women had it.
9
@Mon Ray
The reason there were no fighter pilots at the time was that the Air Force wouldn't train women for that job. They came around to my high school (Bronx Science) looking for recruits. I wanted to be in the space program and asked the recruiter about it. He said, "We don't teach women to fly--we teach them to be secretaries and weather girls."
I didn't need the Air Force to teach me to be a secretary, so I walked away.
13
As an engineer, I know the choice to send only men was decision based on cost and maximizing the chance of success. Now that we can afford to send both sexes to space, that is great. When I read the term gender bias applied as such to the space program, then I feel it's time to shutter NASA. That's because it should be a dominion of science, not politics.
17
@jeff,
Guess you have never understood or cared to comprehend the contributions of women from the beginning of time. It was always about politics to have anything designed, run by and limited to men, especially here in the United States.
For those of us who have spent a lifetime (that predates the space program) fighting for recognition and equality for women, your statements are chillingly obtuse.
8
@SWLibrarian It sounds like youw ere around at the time. Was it acceptable to kill women on the launch pad, or destroy them in a firey blaze in the 50s and 60s? Or would it have been a huge public outcry? Women weren't generally put on the front lines during World War II, so I suspect that with some very rare exceptions the answer is a flat, straight No, It was not publicly acceptable to risk killing women for the space program.
It's petty and intellectually bankrupt to delegitimize the accomplishments of people who happened to be men (not by their own choosing) with 20/20 hindsight and a political agenda. It is as if the entire history of the planet until about 20 years ago should be erased from the books. Instead of trying to rewrite or suppress history - something that used to be the sole province of the right - try looking forward.
The US space programme, and to a similar extent the Soviet space programme, were great achievements. The issue now isn't who did it, the issue is to honour them by going even farther.
54
I saw this in my twitter feed and chuckled. I thought "The Onion is at it again! lol." But it seems this author is serious. Can we celebrate any achievement without turning it into another game in the victimhood olympics?
66
How many women were in leadership positions at the NY Times during the space race?
58
What are feminist doing to make sure the next war has equal casualties? Over 90% of the Iraq casualties were men.
What are the proposals to even that to 50/50 next war?
37
@Tim
My hope would be that if women made the decisions there would not be a war in the first place!!!
35
@Mike B Women did make that decision. They generally voted FOR the war.
For example, the October 2002 vote to authorize the war included YEA votes from Maria Cantwell, Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein,
This is a very odd kind of benevolent sexism you're allowing yourself to indulge in.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=2&vote=00237
the early era astronauts were test pilots, women were not doing those job. Sally ride flew as a mission specialist a non piloting job and NASA put her there just two years after shuttle began. women piloted shuttle as soon as they qualifed. as a reader, don't think otherwise.
8
"Earth" is a large chunk of rock, how can it have gender bias?
6
How many women were test pilots and military pilots when NASA was selecting and training astronauts for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs?
It's a key question because the author unequivocally states that there was gender bias during the early days of the space program.
At the time and as we look back with clear eyes historically, it was imperative that the best test pilots and military pilots of the day flew those missions. The Apollo 10 and Apollo 13 missions are testaments to that stipulation.
NASA required all astronauts of that era to have an engineering degree and be graduates of military jet piloting test programs. However, history records that even women of the 1960's privately organized Women in Space Program failed to qualify.
If there were no female test pilots and military pilots qualified at the time, how and why would we assign 2019 standards to the realities of the 1950's and 60's?
20
Our world is man-made.
Men produce the technologies used exclusively by women.
This kind of aimless, selectve whiging helps no one.
13
Some valid engineering points mixed with revisionist garbage. Taking notes in flight are far from all that makes a test pilot. And I wonder what Ms. Kowal thinks about the invasive, tortuous physiological tests performed on those first astronauts. We were in a political race going into an environment we knew nothing about, and both sides sent animals first for a reason--so call PETA. Then write Dr. Dava Newman and say her new suit designs are too tight and revealing. What next?
We're not 50/50 but in a better age nonetheless. No glass ceiling at NASA, nor at SpaceX, where plenty of female engineers are cheering their launches. So I'll celebrate the progress made by Dr. Ride and Col. Collins who made do with the right stuff and a thick skin if not optimum equipment.
If NYT really wants to open a can, lets talk about Ed Dwight, the black bomber pilot whom the Kennedys tapped for test pilot school and Apollo. However racist Yeager may have acted, he did try to help Dwight catch up to white candidates with more applicable skill and experience. Kennedy's death aside, maybe Dwight would have made without the distraction of having to tour as a civil rights poster man.
11
It's like you want Trump to win.
28
Thank you for the article Ms. Kowal. Did your middle name come from the Frederik Pohl character?
2
When I read your “woke” coverage, I think of Katherine Johnson and Hidden Figures. Thousands of women worked to send men to the moon. Stop erasing women from American history, NYT, simply because it fits your program.
19
Not only where they male, but they were also white and heterosexual.
NASA is responsible for one of the most horrendous chapters of American history. Shame on them!
Am I doing this right?
62
Excellent focus on the unexpected and unintentional impact of biometric sampling from a non-representative subset of future candidates. The strategic planning suggestions are clear and well argued, and helpful.
Not to argue the 'Mercury-13' myths nd misrepresentations over again, but test pilots were not selected for their report writing skills. It was a career that subjected people to supremely lethal stress, revealing those who had the mental steel to retain rational thought when it was critical to selecting and implementing emergency actions. Long after that specific criterion was relaxed, prospective candidates were still asked to describe life-or-death situations they had encountered under which proper actions had to be selected in order to survive. This 'right stuff' could occur in any person of any gender or ethnicity, but the population who had undergone test piloting was verifiably tested and validated by experience. Entry into that career field had been limited not by a greedy desire to monopolize the fun stuff but by the realization it was far more dangerous than other professions, even the kind of flying the women pilots of WW2 performed. The 'protective' instinct dominated even the hopes of protectees who didn't want it, and we've grown up now and women astronauts have died on spaceflights along with their male colleagues, and nobody has flinched. It's better this way.
18
For a Mars mission, the best people to be on board are females of African descent. Weight issues are paramount for travel with food loading a big problem. Food requirements for females is much lower…men just eat more. African women have a slightly higher bone density on average which is big benefit for long term space. The science supports more female astronauts.
The article misrepresents the radiation issues with women as the information is based on nuclear weapons exposure to a large degree. Although women would tend toward higher cancer rates overall, it is not a factor of 10 times and the risk is higher based on age of exposure. Youth and radiation exposure are a bad combination due to rapid growth of a person’s body—cells reproducing while damaged by radiation is the problem. The overall risk for cancer is about 50% higher for women. (I would suspect women would accept such a risk)
10
Come on...did the squad write this?
38
One of the things that is consistently lost in the hindsight hand wringing of the #meToo movement and media coverage is the context of the times. The culture was different 50 years ago. Period. Times have changed, they should and they will.
31
GAWD, I'm sick of men. Where's my bicycle?
13
Reading the Times now feels like reading the Huffington Post. Adolescent. Woke.
50
Should women be allowed in space? In the 1960’s most people would have thought this question to be easy and said no. But now in the 21 century have peoples opinions changed? During the Cold War and the fight to see who got to the moon first between the US and Russia no one even thought that women could go up in space just like a man. Due to this NASA designed all of there suits, tools, and space ships to be suited for a man. Now that NASA is beginning to have more female astronauts they still have not changed there ways leaving everything suited for a man leaving the women to improvise or be unable to do there job properly. After the Apollo 13 crew of all men successful landed on the moon NASA wasn’t rushing into any new plans especially involving women. But at the 50 year anniversary of the landing, they are starting to plan a flight to land a woman on the moon. The problem is they haven’t fixed anything to be designed for men and women. Even though most people have become more excepting of female astronauts they still haven’t found ways to make them just as successful or more successful as men in going to space. So how can we change this? I believe by women stepping up and fighting for what they believe is right will allow them to achieve their goal of landing on the moon just like all the men before them. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/women-astronauts-nasa.html#commentsContainer
2
@Lily Sorbello The Apollo 11 mission was the one which put the first person on the moon. Apollo 13 never made it to the moon because of the explosion of an oxygen take two days after liftoff.
5
I could have sworn gender was a social construct and that simple declarations would instantly solve any issues with diamorphic differences in utilization of equipment. (Please spare me the "difference between sex and gender"--no, that gets conflated all the time).
Your double think is showing, NYT. That said, the reason men were actually used is because men were fighter pilots at the time. And one of the reason men were fighter pilots, like most war fighting jobs, is because musculoskeletal strength was a HUGE limiting factor of early vehicles (And frankly, hauling around heavy loads of equipment).
Most WW2 fighters were NOT power actuated, meaning the pilots had to use physical strength to move the control surfaces. This made men far better pilots, especially over longer periods. Its ONE of the factors which lead to men historically dominating these programs.
Now, in the jet age, power actuation began to be used--but it takes time to change a program, and the space program was drawing from WW2 pilots (IE pilots who were fighter pilots without power actuation). So in order to get the human capital of decades of flight experience, there was no choice but to use men. None of this was sexism. None of it. Men and women are different and the constraints of war and early vehicles heavily favored men.
Things have changed now with fly-by-wire, and more mechanized troop transport ect. Which is why women are entering these fields.
26
@ServetusM
I dispute the claim that men were better pilots - please see the historical evidence of the Night Witches, female military aviators of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, known later as the 46th "Taman" Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, of the Soviet Air Forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
I think women, given the right opportunity and training to talented individuals, would be just as good as male pilots of the era.
7
Who are we kidding? The idea of sending humans to the moon or any other orb in the age of AI is silly and anachronistic. Just send in the robots and we can avoid engendering ill between the sexes. If it will make anyone feel any better we can even put lipstick on some of the robots.
6
@Jay Orchard: Pretty sure some people are excited to go there as a human.
4
Let me tell you I'm absolutely shocked to learn there were was serious gender bias and stereotyping in the 50s and 60s (eye roll). Instead of mulling over the wrongs of eras past let's focus on the women responsible for breaking through and creating paths for countless women to be involved in the space program. We can look at Margaret Hamilton, Judith Love Cohen, Poppy Northcutt, and the entire female staff at Platex that created each space suit.
21
I'm guessing they didn't mean for my take away here to be that gender is very clearly binary and science proves time and time again that there are undeniable physical differences between the male and female bodies, but that's what I got out of it anyway...
26
Not all women are historically divinely naturally created equal and together with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America. African American women are doubly bedeviled by their color aka race and their gender.
The fact that an African American astronaut died aboard Challenger and Columbia is a notable historical anomaly that wouldn't likely occur anywhere else in America outside of crime, entertainment, sports, the military, politics or the pulpit.
3
Why is it whenever an article is published about allowing more people to do what once only a minority were permitted to do, the minority in question starts having blowups in the comments. Chillax. You're not losing anything. You're gaining brilliant colleagues. And the argument of "why can't it just be the way it was"--you don't apply that to everything do you, like modern medicine, the telephone, dental care. So that argument is moot. There's no reason for people to suffer or for anyone on earth to be held back by trapped minds.
30
@R D
Because rather than focusing on how good things are now these articles spend all of their ink castigating our forbearers for how bad things were then.
10
The bias towards men was simply a byproduct of early astronaut candidates being made up of military men and test pilots. Not too many women to be found there.
Today? Should be representative of the overall population.
2
"It was designed by men, for men....Not deliberately for men, perhaps, but women were not allowed in the astronaut program until the late 1970s..."
That sounds pretty deliberate.
That said, I'm so excited for young girls to see a woman walk on the moon. Seeing someone like yourself do these things can be life-changing. Kudos to the women who helped break through the barriers.
20
People lived and operated in their times. And yes there was lots of bias and gender inequality. And yes there still is but we have come a long way.
NASA didn't fly women on early missions because of the public relations aspect of what was going on in those days, our culture and the Cold War with the USSR. While this sounds horrible it's a reality. Selling the loss of three men in the pursuit of a space mission was much easier to pull off then trying to explain why three women burned up inside a space capsule sitting on a launch pad. And again, that was just the time period we were in and the optics that came along with it.
Instead of constantly pointing at the short comings of the past and burning everything in its wake down, how about an article about the women of NASA that broke through the glass ceiling and made huge inroads at NASA in the operational sides of space travel and opened other doors for many women. Two women come to mind right off the bat. Poppy Northcutt and JoAnn Morgan. Both fascinating women. They're alive. Google them.
These two women seem to be getting a lot of coverage elsewhere this week.
Other than that, this article seems to be about space suits that aren't comfortable and if you talked to a man I'm sure he would tell you the same. You're also going to see major changes in space with the creation of commercial space companies and more women entering STEM programs in college.
31
Even Hollywood had trouble envisioning female astronauts. I recall a salacious explanation by the Charleton Heston character in "Planet of the Apes" that the sole American woman on board the mission was, "for breeding ".
5
@Susan, RN and the woman was the only one of the four astronauts who didn't survive the trip..." A malfunction of the deep space sleep chamber" was the excuse...*rolling eyes*
3
Maybe I'm being facetious (ok, so I'm nearly always facetious), but the main reason to send men instead of women into space is that men are more expendable. If it is a question of physical and mental performance, women are preferred.
6
Why stop with just the Apollo space program and its apparent bias against women?
Why not write an article about how Columbus had no women in his expeditions and how it was unfair to women etc etc?
Stop this lunacy of going back and evaluating everything from today's lens. Life doesn't go this way. Be thankful that we are better today than yesterday (or are we?).
74
@SR Literally the gaps remain--a recent mission had to have its crew changed because the required outfits didn't exist for female crew. So...this isn't history that's over. It's history that is limiting possibilities still today, aka it is not yet history. I hope this helps you understand the article better.
30
@R D This is not true. It wasn't that the suits were built for men. It's that they were built for medium size humans. The same problem would have occurred if both astronauts were very large, regardless of their sex.
9
"Presentism" is so tiresome.
4
Send the most qualified people. Enough with injecting gender into everything.
28
@Brad: The problem is, that historically, the 'most qualified' person was always assumed to be the white man.
21
@Brad They can't, sweetheart, because they only made suits for the males. That's the problem. The best person can't go.
18
First Lady Astronaut Trainees dates back to 1961. Look up Jerri Cobb, the subject of a play titled They Promised Her the Moon.
7
@Debra Grieb == The play is fictitious grievance-porn. No women 'trained' for spaceflight in 1961. A few were tested on a subset of standard criteria.
1
Sounds expensive to try to design space suits, space ships and lunar platforms that are suitable for both men and women. It might be cheaper and make more sense to build separate ships for men and women (without any of this gender-fluid "I identify as a woman/man" stuff). In fact, like students, studies show that both male/female astronauts perform better when they train separately.
/s
4
@Jay Orchard Or just choose and design for exclusively female astronauts.
5
I’m confused. The point of this article seems to be to find out what we can learn from the failure of the Apollo program to include women. But women have been in the space program for over 35 years. Don’t we know the answers already? Certainly we know the strengths and weaknesses of men and women in space by now. Why weren’t they included in the article? Or is the real point just to complain about some 50-year-ago sexism?
And the cancelling of the first all-female spacewalk was not due to sexism as the article implies. Anne McClain trained on Earth in the Medium and Large space suits and thought either would work. She planned to use the Large in space but decided the Medium actually fit better there. So they switched space-walkers instead of adjusting the suit.
49
@Chan Yee -- THANK YOU for shining some reality into this fog.
6
Why haven't we prioritized women? They weigh less on average than men, and when you have to include fuel to move every pound of weight (and fuel to move that fuel, and more fuel to move that fuel, etc.) every pound matters.
26
Gender bias in the space race? I can't take it any more.
43
@Talbot
So what? We've had to take it for well more than 50 years.
15
@Talbot Tell me about it! Being a woman is exhausting, when the whole world was built for men. That's what you meant, right?
27
I can just hear Ralph Kramden saying, "To the moon, Alice!" This time it sounds like a battle charge.
7
This is an awesome article. If we can start thinking, really thinking, about user experience in every walk of life then we will, hopefully, make life better for the majority. In this case- male and female, rather than just the male half of the population.
However, this will be a challenge. It is going to be difficult for many males to appreciate or accept that there is even such a thing as male privilege. It’s similar to white privilege (in countries where the majority population is white) where many white people don’t comprehend what that actually means, not to mention the harm that comes from it.
It’s important to change our mindset and to accept that males and females experience the world subtlety differently. To be fully inclusive we have to take account of things that we are not even aware of as being issues- so that means working together and cooperating (and being honest).
Given that astronauts are renowned for thinking through all aspects of a situation they should be ideally placed to find these solutions. It’s a shame, though, that we are only now becoming enlightened to the damage caused by the various unconscious privileges. And that there are so many people in positions of power who would deny attempts to address these imbalances.
48
If we cannot educate, house and feed all of our nation's children, what do you say we stop considering spending money on these vanity projects of sending people (men or women) to the Moon or Mars, etc.?
5
Male priorities.
2
Maybe you don't know this, but the earth has finite resources and the population continues to grow. Making progress in space exploration is ultimately for the good of the human race to survive.
3
@Curiouser
Exploration and progress are male priorities? Guess the female astronauts didn't get the get the memo. Should they be teaching preschool instead?
7
I always found it interesting that the first women in space were put there by the USSR.
19
@scott_thomas But how many did they lose in space? The USSR never talked about launches, missions and astronauts until they returned safely. They operated their program in secrecy and a vacuum to avoid bad PR.
4
@Bryan -- The 'secret losses' turned out to all be misinterpretations and hoaxes. We should be happy about that.
4
The writer's own words:
"One of the women was a mother of eight, and I imagine her looking at the tests and wondering when things would get difficult."
"The gender bias in this statement is, to a modern reader, unmistakable."
12
@Emil Canute There were no fathers of eight about whom to make the statement -- so I'm not seeing the bias here.
13
Shouldn’t we all just be happy and celebrate that as a civilization we sent a human to the moon instead of trying to examine the culture of 1969 through the lens of 2019?
90
@Michael The point of the article is forward-looking. If we want to progress in space exploration, we need the best-qualified people to take part. If someone's got a PhD and a Nobel Prize and the mechanical brain of Henry Ford... but can't do some task because the clothing doesn't fit.... we're wasting an awful lot of money. Seriously, how hard is it to make a small spacesuit? No harder than making a medium one.
Moreover, if we want to have people live in space more permanently, we must know about space effects on women -- unless you have plans to reproduce asexually!
41
@Michael: 1969 was not that long ago. Yes, our cultural lens is different and that's good. But it's okay to acknowledge that it has been until quite recently--and in some ways remains--a man's world.
17
@Michael
I watched it again , I forgot most of it from when it first aired. I felt the memory of those surging accomplishments which we long for now in our angry mood.
I never thought about women not being crew at that time. now 50 years later, of course I would expect it.
4