Why is the universe still white?

In 2018, astronaut Janet Epps was preparing to become the fourth African American woman to travel into space and the first African American crewmember to stay on the International Space Station (ISS). It would have been a momentous occasion. Then, six months before the mission, Epps was abruptly dismissed without explanation.

"I don't know where that decision came from, how it was made, the details, what level it was made at," Epps told a panel at the Tech Open Air Festival late that summer, when he was supposed to board the ISS. 'We don't have time to worry about sexism or racism or any of that stuff. Because we have to perform. If those things come into play, it will hinder our mission, it will hinder our acting. So unless we have a little more information, whether that is a factor or not, we can't guess what people are thinking and doing"

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At the time, NASA did not specify why Epps was removed from the mission. Reached for comment for this article, NASA told Marie Claire that Epps' removal had to do with flight preparation, including extensive physical, emotional, and mental preparation. The training required for the International Space Station mission is very demanding, and the flight readiness requirements (for Janet Epps) were not met. Serena Ornion-Chancellor, who had been assigned to the 58th/59th Expedition Crew (the next mission), backed Epps up and was assigned to the 56th/57th Expedition Crew (the current mission)."

Some may be relieved that Epps' replacement was not a white male. Oñon Chancellor is Latino. However, she is one of 12 Hispanic NASA astronauts and one of two Hispanic female astronauts in the program. Since the program's inception, we have been unable to find reliable data on the number of Asian American women astronauts in space. In other words, NASA's track record of investing in women astronauts of color is by no means solid.

In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first woman of color to go into space, more than 20 years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon; of the 350 astronauts in NASA's 61-year history, only six were black women.

"Even great organizations may turn a blind eye to the persistent intersectional bias that treats African American women so discriminatorily," said Jemison in February 2020, a NASA mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics helped enormously during the first space flights of the 1960s He wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times following the death of Katherine Johnson. In her 2019 White House testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on ways to achieve a more diverse STEM workforce, Jemison noted that two talented African American female astronauts were not sent into space. She mentioned Epps and retired Air Force Colonel Yvonne Keagle. Colonel Yvonne Keagle, M.D., is the only astronaut trained by the military who has never been on a space mission. The reasons for this are unknown.

It is not easy for women of color to get into NASA programs, much less go into space; NASA's application process has changed significantly over the years, and in the early years NASA required applicants to be pilots. But in the 1950s and 1960s, women and most minority groups were not allowed to fly in the military and were automatically disqualified from applying to the space program. only in 1978 did the first female astronauts, including the legendary Sally Ride, the first American woman in space The first female astronauts were born. [Amy Shira Teitel, spaceflight historian and author of the book Fighting for Space, explains, "In the class of 1978, NASA began changing the requirements for astronauts: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight" (opens in a new tab), and spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel explains, "In the class of 1978, NASA began changing the requirements for astronauts. 'Before, everyone was a pilot, then it became a pilot and a mission specialist, and the mission specialist no longer had to be a pilot. The new applicants were scientists specializing in research needed for the mission. This opened the doors of the astronaut program to all people of color, not just women."

It would be unfair to blame NASA alone for the lack of gender and racial diversity in space programs-it is a problem that spills over from all STEM fields. in 2019, women earned less than half of all math and physical science degrees, and minority students earned less than a quarter Fewer than one-fourth...In 2015, Quartz reported that from 1973 to 2012, physics doctorates in this country were awarded to 66 black women and more than 22,000 white men.

"Being a black woman in a field dominated by white men is a daily challenge. Racial and gender inequality is something I am still working on and probably will be for the rest of my career," explained Katrina Miller, a senior physics major at the University of Chicago. 'The further away I go, the less representation I see. I sometimes have the strange realization that I am the first black scientist to physically occupy a particular space, be it a clean room, a research group, or a scientific conference"

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For women pursuing careers in STEM fields, implicit bias can be a hindrance to progress. Dr. Stephanie K. Johnson, Associate Professor of Management at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder, worked with the Hubble Telescope Observation Program to determine whether removing any identification from the application resulted in a more diverse applicant pool for the program.

"If you want to be successful in astrophysics, it is important to have the time and access to these telescopes," Johnson explains.

"If you compare the total number of men who applied for access to the Hubble Telescope to the total number of men who had access, and then compare the total number of women applicants to the total number of women who had access, you find that the men do better every year."

With Johnson's help, the Hubble Space Telescope selection team eliminated any personal identifiers from the application process and instead selected applicants on merit alone. For the first time, women outnumbered men. Johnson is now working with NASA to implement the same hidden bias selection process in their telescope selection program.

Today, the application process for NASA's space program is virtually indistinguishable from when Jemison applied in 1985. For the first time, candidates must take a two-hour online assessment in addition to meeting the basic requirements of being a U.S. citizen and having a master's degree in a STEM field. To eliminate implicit bias, astronauts are no longer required to disclose their ethnicity, and nearly a quarter of applicants in the latest round chose not to reveal their racial background. Of the applicants who revealed their race in the latest call, 55 percent were Caucasian, 5.2 percent were Asian, 2.6 percent were African American, 1.7 percent were Hispanic, 0.2 percent were Native American, and 0.1 percent were Pacific Islander. About 10 percent of the respondents were "multiracial."

Still, it is up to NASA to produce results.

NASA has said that its current lunar exploration program, known as the Artemis Project, plans to land the first woman on the moon in 2024 and eventually on Mars. The latest astronaut graduates include 11 NASA astronauts and two Canadian Space Agency astronauts. Six of them are women, and two are people of color: Jessica Watkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech who identifies as African American, and U.S. Marine Corps Major Jasmine Mogberg, whose parents are from Iran. According to these statistics, it is possible that the next person to go to the moon will be a woman of color. And that is progress.

This article has been updated.

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