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Participation of women in spacecraft science teams

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There is an ongoing discussion about the participation of women in science and particularly astronomy. Demographic data from NASA's robotic planetary spacecraft missions show women scientists to be consistently under-represented.

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Figure 1: Plot of the percentage of women on NASA robotic spacecraft science teams as a function of time.
Figure 2: Percentage of women in planetary science as a function of time from several different workforce surveys.
Figure 3: Effect of participating scientist (PS) and guest investigator (GI) programs on the participation of women in spacecraft teams.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank J. Vertesi for her assistance with the social science literature and editing this manuscript. Furthermore, the data presented here were compiled by a long list of volunteers, most of whom are listed as authors on refs 5 and 6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Julie Rathbun is at the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona 85719, USA, and the University of Redlands, Redlands, California 92373, USA.,

    Julie Rathbun

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Correspondence to Julie Rathbun.

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Rathbun, J. Participation of women in spacecraft science teams. Nat Astron 1, 0148 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0148

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