Women and mission leadership

Only one of NASA's planetary science flight missions in the past 30 years has been led by a women scientist as Principal Investigator. The number of senior women in the field is small, but women are still underutilized, as seen by a cohort age analysis correlating with median ages for various key science roles. Worse, the more junior women are not joining missions as Co-Investigators and Participating Scientists at rates approaching their representation in the field of planetary science. In fact, they are underutilized in these roles not by a few percent, but by greater than a factor of two. The pipeline of women gaining mission experience today is increasing, but it is not keeping pace with the rate that women are now choosing to stay in the field for postdoctoral studies and beyond. The numbers definitively show for the first time that, for whatever reason, women are still underrepresented in mission leadership at NASA.