So what's it like to be a woman engineer at NASA today?


“Maybe there’s a few more males in the field in general, but at the Johnson Space Center, I don’t feel like it’s more one way or the other. I guess I’ve never felt a gender bias, which means we’ve come a long way.” Carolynn “C.J.” Kanelakos, mechanical engineer at the Johnson Space Center, NASA. 


Read more at: http://www.ozy.com/pov/so-whats-it-like-to-be-a-woman-engineer-at-nasa-today/76527

I saw this article at the weekend, regarding another amazing woman, BP Dakshayani, and her contributions to space travel. 


BP Dakshayani led the team that enabled an Indian spacecraft to successfully enter Mars's orbit. One of her colleagues (also female) described the task as like hitting a golf ball in India and expecting it to go into a hole in Los Angeles - a hole, moreover, that was constantly moving.


As a child growing up in the 1960s in Bhadravati, a town in the southern state of Karnataka, Dakshayani's father had initially encouraged her interest, and it flourished. There was only one woman in the town who had studied engineering, and Dakshayani would run out to see her whenever she passed their house. Back then educating girls was not seen as a priority and it was pretty unusual for them to go to university, but her father - an accountant with impressive maths skills - wanted her to study. So she signed up for an engineering degree and graduated top of her year.


After marriage, some of her relatives assumed she would quit her job, she says, "but I am not a person who gives up easily. Also, my father used to say that we should try until the end. Even when it comes to technical things, if I don't understand something, I read it many times until I do."


Sometimes she would go to bed at 1am or 2am, she says, and get up again at 4am to look after her household (husband, parents-in-law, her husband's five siblings and her own two children), then go to work.


"I keep doing some small small modifications and try making new things. I say cooking is similar to coding - just as one small change in the code will result in a different number, similarly a small change in ingredients will result in a different taste," she says.


Read the full article (titled: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit) here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-45374442

Thanks for posting this article Amber...


"I keep doing some small small modifications and try making new things. I say cooking is similar to coding - just as one small change in the code will result in a different number, similarly a small change in ingredients will result in a different taste," she says.


BP Dakshayani is spot on (pun unintended) in her analogy of cooking and coding...could be why I love both...:)


Abi