Highlights from Women In Space 2019

By Kathryn Powell

Kathryn E. Powell, Ph.D. is a planetary scientist studying ancient Martian environments with remote sensing and the MSL Curiosity rover. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University.

Editor's Note: This is one of a series of recaps of the Women in Space conference. Each will feature the viewpoint of someone at a different career stage.

The Women in Space Conference was held February 7 and 8th at Arizona State University’s Skysong facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. The meeting brought together planetary scientists, astronomers, engineers, educators, and others under one roof to discuss a similarly diverse set of topics. The conference format was single-track, which mostly effective at keeping all the attendees in the same room for sessions within and outside of our respective fields. The schedule during the main conference days was distributed between keynotes, panel discussions, and clusters of shorter talks. The latter were nominally eight minutes in duration, although that time limit frequently went flying by during the speaker’s methods section.

Day one kicked off with a keynote given by Dr. Timiebi Aganaba-Jeanty, who shared a funny, upbeat look into her unorthodox path into space law. She set a precedent for honesty, openness, and optimism from the podium. Following suit, the mood in the room stayed fairly light and relaxed throughout the meeting. There were some serious moments, most notably during a panel discussion on sexual harassment, but these were the exception rather than the rule. Subjects stayed focused on a celebrating on the awesome work women are already doing and how we can take concrete actions against those who’d like to drag us down. We discovered shared connections on unusual things, such as the running joke that emerged concerning people’s enthusiasm for sand.

The short talks ran the gamut from Mars analog science to upcoming Earth-orbiting LiDAR to educational programs for high school students to launch experiments to space. One memorable moment was Sarah Lamm’s presentation of a low-budget Curiosity mockup for classrooms, which drew laughs but actively demonstrated how science outreach can be fun and accessible. On a more academic note, Mallika Sarma gave a particularly interesting talk on sex differences in body composition and energy expenditure while working in extreme environments like Mars.

A recurring theme emerged that applies not only to conference attendees but throughout subfields of space exploration as well. While those in the room had a diversity of expertise, ages, life experiences, and gender expressions (yes, men were present), the same could generally not be said for racial and ethnic diversity. The vast majority of attendees were white. At least, however, this fact was repeatedly acknowledged, starting with an early presentation by Dr. Julie Rathburn lamenting the diversity of astronomy and planetary science all the way to pleas in the conference organizers’ closing remarks for more help diversifying panels.

Coming in to the conference, I was little dubious about the broad interests being represented, and I must admit some of the engineering sessions totally lost me in technical details. But surprisingly I found that some of the most valuable conversations I had at the meeting were with experts outside of my own field of planetary science. Hearing about the winding career paths of many of the participants reminded me that many of us do not fall squarely into one category or another. There is a lot of value in having cross-discipline conversations about topics that affect all women in space, and (I hope!) in finding resources to better our lives in the future. Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton closed the meeting with a fantastic final keynote, reminding us all that “space exploration is a great vehicle to inspire people to do the things you care about”.