NASA just named an all-male crew for ‘Artemis III’: what’s a woman to do?

In April, Christina Koch became the first woman to travel to the Moon, flying around its far side aboard Artemis II. Two months later, NASA named the crew for the next mission, Artemis III, and not one of them is a woman, despite the fact that women make up roughly 40% of the astronaut corps. One giant step for womankind… and then an unexpected drop-off. This is the reality of the women’s leadership labyrinth. Nearly 20 years ago, Alice Eagly and Linda Carli gave that analogy its name. The path to women’s leadership, they argued, is no longer a glass ceiling, but a labyrinth that is navigable, yet full of turns, dead ends, and systemic challenges from discrimination to childcare. NASA just seemingly walked women as an entire gender into another unexpected turn. But here is what I’ve came to know after spending a career in aerospace and completing my doctoral research on the women who have reached the top of the most extreme profession on Earth: the labyrinth is real, and while we must champion systemic change, waiting for the system to evolve is a losing strategy. The path through the leadership labyrinth is built from countless small, deliberate acts that happen in community. I spent the last couple years studying 25 women astronauts (more than a fifth of every woman who has ever left the planet) through primary interviews, oral histories, and other secondary data, on the premise that if you want to understand how a high-performing woman comes to believe she can lead, in a boardroom, an operating room, or a C-suite, study the ones who had to believe it against the longest odds there are. We can learn a lot from these extraordinary women, and here’s what they taught me. Leadership is a process Leadership is not a skill developed in 12-week program or a journey that begins with a management title. Leadership development, in women especially, is a lifelong process of building self-efficacy – belief in oneself and their capability to do what they intend to – and