MOSCOW: A group of Russian women embarked on an all-female mock moon mission on Wednesday, and officials say the experiment is a step toward correcting gender imbalance in Russia’s space missions.
The six Russian women in red jumpsuits at a pre-space mission press conference kept having to field questions about makeup and men.
“We are doing work,” Anna Kussmaul, one of the women, responded according to the AFP. “When you’re doing your work, you don’t think about men and women.”
On Wednesday an all-female Russian space crew started an eight-day mock moon mission, which researchers say will help Russian women catch up after four decades of male-dominated aeronautics.
“There’s never been an all-female crew on the ISS,” Sergei Ponomaryov, the experiment’s supervisor, told the AFP. “We consider the future of space belongs equally to men and women and unfortunately we need to catch up a bit after a period when unfortunately there haven’t been too many women in space.”
The Russian space agency Roscosmos released the preparatory video of the women in the mock space shuttle the same week it announced a planned moon landing in 2029, the Guardian reported.
Russian women have been well represented in the workplace for decades, but they are still working toward more active leadership roles throughout society. The Soviet Union pushed women into the workplace at a rate of 90 percent, but when it collapsed, so did the systems, such as state childcare, that had made it possible for women to more fully participate in the workforce, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
