Women in STEM: 50 years and counting

By Cindy Chin

50 years ago, the first man step foot on the moon. It was an amazing achievement in the history of the human race and we are again on the precipice of a new frontiers and historical times. The Apollo Missions were game changing missions and our world as we knew it back then in 1969 changed. In looking back, I started to explore some questions. What would we have done differently 50 years ago had we known? Space is hard and it took a lot of sacrifice to get to this point. The sacrifice was also of women’s voices, the hidden figures in STEM that were not told, until now.

Today, we know that women’s economic participation is critical to global growth across all sectors. And we know that the business case for diversity and gender equality is significant reflects social impact and its placement as a priority for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Goal 5 of the SDGs specifically addresses women’s equality and empowerment but gender equality is also integral to our global ability to meet all 17 of the SDGs.

In January 2015, McKinsey & Company published a report on “Why Diversity Matters” and published its research on the effect of diverse workforces on companies’ financial performance. Recently, a follow-up report by McKinsey, “Women in the Workplace 2018” indicates that progress on gender diversity work has stalled, calling companies to turn good intentions to concrete actions. The bottom line is women are doing their part; corporate leadership is not doing all it can.

NASA Datanauts

The same occurred in the tech sectors, research, and applied sciences. When NASA kicked off a Women in Data study a few years ago, it was to better understand how to engage women and girls with NASA data and the discipline of data science. One initiative, the International Space Apps Challenge annual hackathon, the largest hackathon on the planet, attracted approximately 75-80% men. As a result, NASA added to its flagship open data initiative called “Open NASA,” the NASA Datanauts program designed to teach and practice data skills, problem-solving techniques, and engage newcomers with NASA’s 32,000 open data sets available to the public and building a data science community. Through activities that encourage collaboration between members, groups, skill sharing, and the merging of ideas, NASA Datanauts and the International SpaceApps Challenge have grown into a vibrant international community of people interested in learning how to develop data science skills through access and used of NASA’s open data resources, mission scientists, and technicians in the realms of earth and planetary sciences in space.

Spacesuits are not only a classic icon of human space exploration and imagination, they are also a personalized spaceship that mimics all of the protection from the harsh environment of space and the basic resources that Earth and its atmosphere provide.

NASA’s public launch event of the next generation space suits that will be worn by astronauts on the Artemis Missions and the return of human beings on the moon in 2024 showed how women were in the forefront of the newest technologies, this time intentionally included in the design and engineering.

The new suit that will be worn on Artemis missions is called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU for short. According to NASA, its history is a tale of engineering evolution, traced all the way back to the Mercury space suits that were once upgraded Navy high-altitude flight suits. The space suit engineers from NASA Johnson Space Center Lindsay Atchinson, Amy Ross, Kristine Davis who modeled the xEMU suit, and Dustin Gohmert the Orion OCSS suit were also in attendance and spoke of their capabilities. The suit is designed for high risk situations and emergencies like extreme temperatures and pressure variations so that astronauts will be able to accomplish more complex tasks on the lunar South Pole in 2024. The suit was designed not just as clothing and protective gear, but also function as a personalized life-sustaining spacecraft during EVA’s, also known as spacewalks.

The Orion OCSS orange flight suit will be worn by astronauts to the moon as well as on the return journey, from launch to high-speed re-entry to Earth. The suit is also designed for high rise situations with upgrades that include advanced mobility, enhanced communications systems and protection from extreme temperatures with its fire resistant material. It can keep an astronaut alive for up to six hours, an hour longer than previous generations spacesuits.

STEM Education

How does this impact the STEM fields? We still have a long way to go where a significant part of the world’s population has yet to understand the implications of technology and science. The results from studies in neuroscience from Carnegie Mellon University was recently published in the November 8, 2019 issue of the journal Science of Learning. Their research shows that there is no gender disparity in how children learn and perform math tasks. The brains of girls and boys are similar, producing equal abilities in mathematics. When choosing STEM fields, most girls will choose other disciplines of studies when they see fewer role models in the classroom and beyond into research fields and workforce. There are fewer paths towards promotion, being published in scientific articles or journals, and even rarer, the coveted scientific echelons of Nobel Prize recipients.

A database of more than 9,000 women working in the science fields was recently created by women to highlight the contributions of female scientists and their work in their respective fields to address the misperception of a lack of women in science. If not to publish the list themselves, who else will when historically most of the scientific editorial decisions have been made by men? “Too often, high-profile articles, conference panels, and boards are filled with a disproportionate number of male voices. News stories are reported by more men by a huge margin, and this imbalance is reflected in how frequently women are quoted.”

Impact on Gender Equality in the Future of Work

In the recent Council on Foreign Relations inaugural Symposium on Women and the Law, the focus was on leveling the economic playing field for women and launching the Women’s Workplace Equality Index, the first global ranking of countries based on the gender equality in the workplace.

When there are significant gender gaps in women’s labor force participation, pay and workplace equality in every types of economy: advanced, middle-income, or low-income. Access to labor markets and compensation is lower for women. The gender difference in compensation on a global scale is 50 percent, scaled lower for advanced economies at 16 percent. If that gap closed entirely with the same labor force with men and women participating in labor force, the overall GDP of a community or nation would increase by 25 percent.

“If we believe in gender equality, then our projects have to be supporting girls’ education, women entrepreneurship, gender lens on everything we do.”
- Kristalina Georgiva, World Bank

Gender inequality deprives societies from wealth. According to Ms. Georgiva, the World Bank calculated this wealth loss at a staggering number of $160 trillion. In a partnership with DFID and the Gates Foundation, the World Bank is adding a funding vehicle for social response with an emphasis on social payments.

According to results of the McKinsey & Company’s study on the future of women at work, to capture job opportunities, millions of women could need to make major work transitions by 2030. 40 million to 160 million women will be impacted by workplace automation or artificial intelligence in a digital transformation era. The average of 20 percent of working women (107 million) could lose their jobs to automation. The numbers are fairly equal to men as well, but the impact on families are felt stronger with women making more domestic decisions.

Diversity Matters

Women have very few CEO and role models at top executive positions to look up to, but a man graduating from college has at least a dozen to choose which leadership styles they would lean towards. If you are a woman of color, it is even less. By increasing the number of women in leadership positions including board rooms across all industry sector, especially tech and finance industries, will have significant impact in gender equality and global markets.

There is an 80% rate that women will leave their job if she is harassed in the workforce leaving a massive skills and gender data gap. A red flag for any organization’s transformational process in a data-driven, digital age. Global asset management firms and shareholders have cautioned and started adding external pressure against this practice in organizations, not to mention a talent war to replace the exodus. The future of work is then very bleak.

Particularly in tech companies, CMO roles most often held by women have the lowest mean equity award that is 39% less than men Carta study of 300,000 employees at more than 10,000 companies. There is a severe lack of representation in early founding teams that have received venture capital investment. 13% of all founders are female with only 2.2% of venture funding across the entire venture capital industry. As a result, only two female tech billionaires according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Equity gap of 47 cents for every dollar of equity men have in 2018. In 2019, the equity gap has narrowed to 49 cents women held for every dollar of equity men have. Women make up more than 1/3 of all employees, but only hold 20% of equity wealth.

At the current rate, according to the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap report, the United States is still 208 years away from achieving gender equality, compared with Canada’s projected 51-year timeline and the United Kingdom’s 74-year timeline to close the gender gaps.

How to close the gender gaps is not rocket science. Gates advised to sponsor or mentor someone, preferably a woman, who does not look like you or come from the same community. It increases the talent pool, creativity, and ideas for innovation to flourish. They also need to be willing to work together as partners who are already mobilized. There exists more than dozens of women’s organizations and leaders such as Smash Strategies, the Women’s Forum, and even my work with CLC Advisors and our investment thesis who champion such efforts. All one needs to do is to read someone’s LinkedIn profiles and articles to see who those leaders are. (Mine is available here.)

The Future is Female

In October 2019, for the first time in history, women were at the forefront. Each of the first 420 spacewalks included a man. That changed with the 421stplanned spacewalk where astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir participated in the first all-female spacewalk outside of the International Space Station (ISS) to repair a faulty battery charger on the International Space Station’s (ISS) truss structure to restore power capabilities for the lab station’s operations and ongoing research.

In its 235 year history, National Geographic has published a magazine that features all female photographers and edited by all-female editors. As these events occurred in history this week, we were reminded by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine that Apollo had a twin sister and her name was Artemis. She was hunter and her best friend and favorite companion was Orion. All astronauts in their return voyage to the moon will fly under the Artemis Mission inside the Orion capsule and this week, we will witness history in the making where women for the first time intentionally right in the forefront of the journey from Moon to Mars.

Representation matters. The challenge is changing the lens and reframing the perceptions in technology bias.

I am deeply grateful and fortunate to be able to use the NASA Datanauts platform to tell the world the stories of space, open data, collaboration, and partnerships. It is a huge honor and privilege and one I do not take for granted. But what is most fulfilling is the opportunity to be the window and spotlight for possibilities for people in order to lift them up and say, you can do this too. Women, girls, and people of color need to see themselves represented and participating in these discussions so that the catalysts and opportunities for positive change can occur. Gender equality, gender parity, people of color and inclusion is the way to build the future and the future is here NOW. Our cities, societies, and culture on and beyond our planet need it.

Per aspera ad astra. Keep reaching for the stars for when you look above and wonder, you’ll realize how precious home is and how important it is to solve our problems not just above, but within our atmosphere.

About Cindy Chin

 
Cindy Chin is an entrepreneur, venture strategist, and cultural ambassador of the arts and sciences. As CEO of CLC Advisors, LLC, she is an advisor and board member to founding startup teams, a subject matter expert in frontier technologies, opportunity scout for VC and LP partners, a global strategic thought leader, and a sought-after speaker.

She is one of NASA’s International SpaceApps Challenge Ambassadors and also a NASA Datanaut, an open data innovation program to promote data science, coding, and gender diversity operating within the Office of the CIO at NASA Headquarters. She is a Co-Founder of Women on the Block, an organization created by blockchain enthusiasts to promote empowerment of women to ensure diversity and inclusion in technology, an Ambassador for the d.Pulse Conference,a mentor in the Google Launchpad Mentor Program, Stanford University’s Technology Entrepreneurship and undergrad programs, and a member of the faculty of the Startup Executive Academy of Silicon Castles in Salzburg, Austria. She was the former artificial intelligence and machine learning program curator for the Digility Conference and Expo in Cologne, Germany, advisor to Women in Blockchain International, and a former management consultant at McKinsey & Company, Inc. and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

She was named as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s “50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs in 2018” along with leaders including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, General Motor’s CEO Mary Barra, celebrity chef and founder of World Central Kitchen José Andrés, “Crazy Rich Asians” author Kevin Kwan, Chance the Rapper, Academy Award winning actress and founder of Hello Sunshine’s Reese Witherspoon, and IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty.

About CLC Advisors

CLC Advisors is a firm of trusted advisors and subject matter experts in frontier technologies (AI, blockchain, ioT, mobility, and big data) and entrepreneurship focusing on development and execution strategies to build and incubate values-based business ventures, innovations, initiatives, and forward exponential technologies to future societies and smART cities. We specialize in building active global entrepreneurship ecosystems, smart cities, social impact and sustainability. By leveraging public-private sector partnerships for maximum social impact and sustainability, we help build great companies by defining strategies for building multidisciplinary ecosystems, accelerators, outreach, and innovation phases of ventures, alternative revenue generation and sustainability.

We work with global businesses, government institutions and organizations in both the private, public, and social sectors. By pairing great talent where gender parity and diversity are critical factors for consideration and the access to capital needed to scale on a global and planetary level, we are dedicated to finding solutions for business models to expand into the growing arenas of impact investing, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and venture capital. CLC Advisors is committed to focusing on large-scale problems and issues of not just the world’s problems, but the integral survival of the planet and humanity. www.clcadvisors.com