You’d think that there would be some places in which women are free from sexist behavior. Women’s bathrooms. Drum circles. Space.
Apparently “the final frontier” is not immune to stupid sexist generalizations, as an all-female cosmonaut crew discovered. Considering that there have been all-male crews since the beginning of manned space flight, having a crew of all one sex really shouldn’t be so hard for people to understand.
The women are not actually headed into space; they are volunteers in a simulated space flight to see how an all-female crew would function in space. This is a common way to test the function of human teams in space– recently, there was a simulation of over a year to see how humans would deal with a manned Mars flight.
Pretty advanced stuff. Except when it comes to female cosmonauts, apparently. The director of Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems, which initiated the test, said:
“I’d like to wish [them] a lack of conflicts, even though they say that in one kitchen, two housewives find it hard to live together.”
Really? Housewives in a kitchen? That’s the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks of an all-female cosmonaut team? Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a housewife in a kitchen, and they are not less important people than cosmonauts, blah, blah, blah. But come on– women bickering over soup seasonings and how small to dice vegetables is not comparable to a revolutionary all-female cosmonaut team in space.
And the sexist thinking doesn’t end there. The six women (who included scientific researchers and a doctor) were questioned on how they would survive without makeup, washing their hair, and men.
A simple test for sexism is to reverse the genders of the people involved to assess whether it feels weird. Out of the dozens of all-male teams, do you imagine they got one question about how they will feel without toiletries? No, because space is wicked-cool, and there are way more important questions to ask.
There have been recent scandals involving women facing institutionalized sexism on college campuses and in professional soccer. Hopefully, soon “the final frontier” will be free of discrimination, and will be available to all.
