OVER the past 20 years, 128 astronauts have spacewalked for a total of 1300 hours to assemble and maintain the International Space Station (ISS). Until now, just nine of those people have been women. Next week, when Anne McClain and Christina Koch step into the void, that number will rise to 11. Another milestone will be reached too: this will be the first of the 213 ISS spacewalks to be entirely composed of women.
On the one hand, I am excited. On the other, I am trying not to wince. It is hard to be unreservedly enthusiastic when astronauts named Alex, Sergey, Stephen or Yuri spacewalk outside the station twice as often as women.
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Looking at the historical context doesn鈥檛 make this more cheery. Of more than 500 people who have reached space, just 64 have been women. Of 222 (soon to be 224) astronauts who have spacewalked, McClain and Koch are just the 13th and 14th women. Even the composition of this historic spacewalk is random chance, the outcome of Koch joining a rescheduled mission after a launch was aborted in October. Women are less likely to go into space at all, and if they do, they are half as likely to spacewalk.
It isn鈥檛 physiological differences driving the divide. Astronaut Douglas Wheelock describes spacewalking as ballet on fingertips, meaning grip strength and mobility are more important than brute strength. But thanks to decades of studies that treated men as the default, we still don鈥檛 have a complete picture of how spaceflight affects women. Initial findings suggest that women may have greater resistance to the vision impairments that can strike men in the astronaut corps, and their lower average size and metabolic rates may mean crews with more women consume fewer resources, but we don鈥檛 have enough data to know how much of that is down to individual variation.
The future is slightly brighter, with NASA鈥檚 last two training cohorts being 50 per cent women, and the Canadian Space Agency doing likewise for its most recent recruitment. The European and Chinese space agencies aren鈥檛 keeping pace, however, and the Russian space agency doesn鈥檛 have a single woman in either its active or candidate astronaut corps. Change is coming, but it is still a long, slow slog to reaching gender equality, and diversity along other axes feels like even more of a fantasy.
I will celebrate that we have two women spacewalking outside the ISS, and many more women running console support at Mission Control. But I am going to be swallowing my frustration during that victory toast, irate that we are only hitting basic markers of equality 50 years after humans first ventured into space.
Article amended on 21 March 2019
We corrected which space agency has a training cohort half of whom are women
