[LINK] "Are there going to be any women at this party?"

[rfmcdonald]

Dwayne Day's article in The Space Review has gotten a fair amount of publicity on my Facebook friends list. By and large, the comments have been pretty productive.

Last week was the tenth anniversary of The Space Review. These days barely a week goes by without somebody launching yet another space blog. There are now so many of them, with so much overlapping coverage, that it’s impossible to keep track. That has been one of the benefits of The Space Review: it is not a blog, it is a weekly journal, with longer-form opinion and commentary and even historical essays (sometimes with footnotes!) Although sometimes the essays stray into goofy territory, they are rarely partisan or uncivil, which cannot be said for many space blogs.

But if you go back over ten years of The Space Review, or even over the past year, you may notice something missing: women. There are almost no women who have written for The Space Review. We have the white, middle-aged male demographic pretty well covered, but that’s pretty much true of the space blogosphere too. Why are there no women writing for The Space Review?

Alas, I don’t have a good answer why. There are a few women who are prominent in the space field, such as the current NASA Deputy Administrator and the CEO of SpaceX, among others, although female representation in space leadership positions is undoubtedly lower than it is for many other fields. Women are better represented in the space sciences, particularly astronomy and planetary sciences. The group Women in Aerospace has done a great job over the years supporting women in the field with recognition and scholarships. There are some women bloggers in the space field, and the best space policy website is run by a woman. But most female space bloggers tend to be located more in the sciences than other areas. It is certainly true that women are not well-represented in space enthusiast and activist communities, where a simple head count at space-related conferences reveals that their numbers are often less than twenty-five percent and sometimes under ten percent.