Astronaut Demographics vs STEM/Military Diversity Trends

Inspiration

As women in STEM we were most inclined to pursue and look at the women involved within the field of space. Additionally this topic, especially the focus on women as astronauts was close to our hearts because Christina Koch and the three of us in our group are NCSSM alumni just like her!

What it does

This project informs equity initiatives to the wider populations and aims to educate/ propel change and growth when it comes to astronaut recruitment processes.

How we built it

We first utilized the provided dataset of the astronaut mission data. In order to to go about the project we compile demographic astronaut and STEM/Military datasets, by doing our own research and ultimately producing our own datasets. After standardize demographic variables, we utilized Google Colab to write our code using Python and using our methods of representation gap analysis and policy overlay we analyzed trends and disparities across decades.

Challenges we ran into

Finding the accompanying datasets to go along with our research was quite challenging. Additionally our sample size was small so we were unable to conduct all analyses.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The depth of statistical analysis that we were able to complete, as well as our project management skills for this project.

What we learned

We learned how to complete statistical analysis, how to complete a project in this time of time span, how to look for and create our own datasets.

What's next for Astronaut Demographics vs STEM/Military Diversity Trends

What we hope happens next is hope that we find more extensive data to conduct a more detailed analysis and dive deeper into intersectional analysis and want to consider potential factors of causation.