The likelihood of an all male Artemis III crew #shorts

So a lot has been said about this all male Artemis III crew already, but let me add tha purely from a statistics perspective if you draw 3 people randomly from the current list of 37 active NASA astronauts, and 1 person from the 11 active ESA astronauts, the probability you get an all male crew is 14%. The most likely scenario is 3 men, one woman at around 38%, that’s what we had for the Artemis I crew, and the second most likely scenario is 2 men, 2 women at 34%. Now of course crew selection is not random, it's based on experience and availability, but if you assume that gender is independent of those things, which it should be, then these stats still apply here. So the Artemis III crew isn’t statistically anomalous in that it’s all male once again, let’s just add it to the very long list of all male crews there’ve been for spaceflight missions. I think it just feels especially frustrating because we keep hearing that progress is being made towards equality and equal representation, like with the announcement that the most recent intake of NASA astronauts had 6 women and 4 men, making it the first time women out numbered men in an intake, or the first all female space flight crew on Blue Origin in 2025, or the first all female spacewalk with Christina Koch and Jessica Meir on the International Space Station in 2019, but then you get this announcement of the Artemis III crew, and it feels like a step backwards, not forwards. So I’m just looking at these stats of random draws from the current crop of astronauts and trying to reassure myself that the likelihood is the crew for the Artemis IV mission planning to land humans on the Moon, should have at least one, if not more women aboard. I mean there’s even a 1.5% chance it could be an all female crew. What I will say is that the chance of back-to-back all male crews being randomly drawn from the current astronaut crop is 0.55%, or a 1 in 180 chance, which would be statistically significantly anomalous. It’s the same probability as flipping a coin and getting heads 8 times in a row. It’d be around about then you’d start to wonder if your coin was weighted. So I’m willing to put this all male Artemis III crew down to random chance, but if it happens again with the next Artemis crew, that’s when I’ll start flipping tables. Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: [email protected] Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com