Digital Natives: Teens, Tweens, & Digital Media: Remembering Sally Ride’s Advocacy for STEM and Gender Equity

The news that Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, had died of pancreatic cancer at age 61 inspired a flood of stories and remembrances about Ride’s role as a leader in STEM education and an inspiration for girls around the world.

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Filed by Christine Cupaiuolo

It also reminded me of her sense of humor and love for discovery.

Ride was only 32 when she embarked on her first shuttle ride in 1983. Armed with degrees in physics, astrophysics and English (she studied Shakespeare), Ride saw a NASA ad for astronauts in a newspaper and applied. She made the cut and began training. NASA was ready to welcome women, but as Ride’s obit in The New York Times reminds us, not everyone was:

Speaking to reporters before the first shuttle flight, Dr. Ride — chosen in part because she was known for keeping her cool under stress — politely endured a barrage of questions focused on her sex: Would spaceflight affect her reproductive organs? Did she plan to have children? Would she wear a bra or makeup in space? Did she cry on the job? How would she deal with menstruation in space?

The CBS News reporter Diane Sawyer asked her to demonstrate a newly installed privacy curtain around the shuttle’s toilet. On “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson joked that the shuttle flight would be delayed because Dr. Ride had to find a purse to match her shoes.

At a NASA news conference, Dr. Ride said: “It’s too bad this is such a big deal. It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.”

The day after the Ride’s first shuttle launch, Gloria Steinem said, “Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.”

Maybe they were also inspired by Ride’s words upon her return from space: “I’m sure it was the most fun that I’ll ever have in my life.”

Ride retired from NASA in 1987 and became a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford. Two years later, she became a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute at the University of California, San Diego.

In 2001 she started Sally Ride Science, a science education company that aimed, in her words, to “make science and engineering cool again.” She wrote science books for children and advocated for gender equity in education. From The Times obit, written by Denise Grady:

In 2003, Dr. Ride told The Times that stereotypes still persisted about girls and science and math — for example the idea that girls had less ability or interest in those subjects, or would be unpopular if they excelled in them. She thought peer pressure, especially in middle school, began driving girls away from the sciences, so she continued to set up science programs all over the country meant to appeal to girls — science festivals, science camps, science clubs — to help them find mentors, role models and one another.

“It’s no secret that I’ve been reluctant to use my name for things,” she said. “I haven’t written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life. But this is something I’m very willing to put my name behind.”

Ride’s interest in this area had started decades earlier. Education Week has posted a 1985 interview with Ride (available to subscribers only and summarized here) in which she discussed the role of parents and teachers in encouraging girls’ interest in science and the “cultural” problems that girls and young women face in STEM fields.

“One of the main problems girls face is the fact that nearly every place they turn they are still confronted with sexual stereotypes,” she told Education Week.

And just this past May, in a post at Mashable, she wrote:

[W]e must start early with students. In fact, fourth through eighth grade is critical. This is the age where many students, particularly girls and minorities, begin to disengage from these subjects. They feel and internalize the influences of peer pressure, popular culture, and society’s expectations. Science isn’t cool, negative stereotypes persist about scientists, mathematicians and engineers, and studying hard is rarely celebrated on reality TV or in pop music. In fact, my organization targets teachers in this critical grade range for precisely these reasons.

This remarkably crafted video (which I found via Melissa Silverstein) captures all the contradictions and complexities in the history of women, science, space and pop culture. It doesn’t make any specific statement—only short clips of female characters from dozens of sci-fi films set to an infectiously appropriate song by The Imagined Village—but it speaks volumes about how women in scientific fields have to negotiate, as Sally Ride did so gracefully in her own life, both their inherent desire for knowledge and adventure and society’s often limiting stereotypes of what they can and should be doing with their lives.