Women belong on every team

There are no women on the Artemis III crew. That’s the short headline. (Yesterday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent a public reply out mansplaining to us why. I will annotate that for you in a separate post.) Very little of the reaction I’ve seen so far addresses why it’s so important to have women on the team — we seem to take it as a given. And none of what I’ve seen from people explaining the idea that there’s no females on the crew really helps.

I have some experience here, so I wanted to weigh in.

A little background

For fifteen years, I was a volunteer at a disaster relief agency. We used volunteers like me to do our most important, and pointy-ended, work: assessing the damage from environmental and manmade disasters (read: climate and conflict disasters); liaising with governmental and non-governmental agencies and our beneficiaries on the ground, delivering our aid to people who needed it, and finally, assessing how we could do better in the future. The vast bulk of our teams and deployments were 2–4 people, and the vast majority of the time, I was on teams with one other woman, or I was the only woman. No woman was ever in the key operational or security role at the agency the entire time I was there.

I’m not going to unpack figures for you in terms of how many times I deployed to areas of disaster with an all-woman team (once), because actually, it doesn’t matter: Women need to be on every team, and although I’ve posited in a previous post that representation…