On Friday Women in Aerospace (WIA) hosted a breakfast honoring NASA’s senior female leadership, including Mary Cleve, Lynn Cline, Shana Dale, Angela Phillips Diaz, and Lisa Porter. The speakers primarily discussed their careers at the agency, with little discussion on policy topics. (Someone asked about concerns about the lack of women on the new NASA Advisory Council—only one woman among its 24 members—and one of the speakers said that Michael Griffin “is not filling quotas, he wants to fill particular areas of expertise” and that the agency “is very committed to diversity.”)
The best—or at least most humorous—quip came from Dale’s talk, about the formation of WIA 20 years ago:
WIA’s founding members decided that the good old boys’ club needed some company, from those just as comfortable watching the Oxygen Channel as they are working with liquid oxygen. [laughter] You know, I just had to use that sentence. The guys in Public Affairs had drafted a few talking points for me and this one just cracked me up. [laughter] The Oxygen Channel? I don’t watch TV that much, and it’s usually just the news or C-SPAN. But, you know, when I do, I watch Ultimate Fighting on Spike TV.
The unanswered question from all this, of course, is whether there is any similarity between Ultimate Fighting and, say, the NASA appropriations process.
