NASA want the first person on Mars to be a woman - but why are there so few female 'firsts'?

Today, a senior engineer at NASA said something that got us a little bit excited (and firmly nodding our heads): the first woman to step foot on Mars should be a woman.

Allison McIntyre – who heads-up training for space travellers at Johnson Space Center in Houston – spoke to BBC Radio 5 Live about the underrepresentation of women in the 21st Century space race.

She said: “We have female astronauts, but we haven’t put a woman on the Moon yet, and I think the first person on Mars should be a woman.”

While this is great news for women’s prospects in space travel, a quick search of the women’s ‘firsts’ in history brought up some disappointing results.

We found plenty of articles celebrating the first time women had done things – this list by The Telegraph is pretty comprehensive – but considerably less on the times women were the first to do things before men.

There’s a difference.

Save for the likes of Marie Curie, it’s clear women missed out in partaking in pioneering some of the most historic moments, from exploration to invention, science, business and sports.

Streams of articles outline how males were the first to land on the moon, fly across the Atlantic solo and climb Mount Everest… the list is endless.

For women, famous accolades include the first to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel (Shirley Dinsdale in 1949) and being the first lead actor to appear in a nude scene (Audrey Munson in Inspiration, 1915).

There are even some groundbreaking moments in history that women DID do, but which men got the credit for in the history books.

HuffPost interestingly point out that Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was found to have discovered nuclear fission with her partner Otto Hahn in the 1930s. Being Austrian, Meitner had to flee in 1933 when Hitler came to power and she was denied proper credit for her involvement in the discovery because she was a Jewish refugee. Instead, her partner Hahn won a Nobel Prize for his work in 1944, and refused to give her credit.

Similarly, Rosalind Franklin – a researcher at King’s College London – discovered the double-helix while studying one day along with her student Raymond Gosling in 1951, but Gosling and his colleague named Maurice Wilkin won the Nobel Prize for it in 1962, four years after she died.

In the 1960s, college student Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to observe radio pulsars, helping Anthony Hewish and Martin Ryle by analysing data from a radio telescope when she noticed inconsistencies. Yet Hewish and Ryle received the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery in 1974.

Sense a trend?

While the problem clearly stems from how women were (and remain) under represented in science and engineering industries – the 2018 Gender Pay Gap figures see to highlight this – we can only hope there’s change on the horizon.

So the first person to land on Mars being a woman? Now that would be one for the history books.

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