The day that I meet Katherine Bennell-Pegg kicked off with a session at the LEGO store in Pitt Street. The astronaut was surrounded by children bombarding her with questions about what it’s really like being in space.
As cliche as it sounds, it gave me goosebumps thinking about what it would mean for the young girls in the room getting to chat to Australia’s first ever female astronaut – and I am sure other adults in the room that day felt the same way.
It’s this kind of representation that makes this new collaboration between LEGO and the Australian Space Agency so significant – and why we wanted to chat to Katherine about how she’s really changing the way things are done.
Katherine tells me about the barriers she faced as a “young girl growing up in love with space.”
“I was definitely in the minority as a woman at that time. Probably the first barrier I felt that I hit was I didn’t even know what engineering was towards late high school and that apparently is still a problem,” she tells me. “Australia has surveyed a lot of young women who don’t really know tangibly what a lot of the careers are. And so that’s barrier number one. Barrier number two is the fact that a lot of things are viewed as gendered, even from young childhood.”
She says that when she started training as an astronaut, a friend wrote to her saying she had a four-year-old daughter who was refusing to wear the astronaut costume she had bought because she said that “astronauts are for boys, and space is for boys.”
“My friend was able to show her the picture of me and the other women I was training with – three out of six of us in the class were women by merit, not design,” Katherine says. “And so then her daughter got so happy and put it on. Just at that age already, you know, it had become an issue. It’s that whole, [you] can’t be what you can’t see piece is really translating.”
She acknowledges that she has many “firsts” as she becomes an astronaut. “It’s a lot of ‘What is Catherine the first at?’ You know, the first to be trained under the Australian flag is one, to represent Australia. The other is ‘First Australian Woman [astronaut]’. And the headline is almost invariably, Australia’s first female astronaut.” Ironically, we’ve used the same. She says she finds it the most interesting because “the first one was a bigger barrier to break. But in people’s minds, it wasn’t. It was the fact that I was a woman that’s the most interesting.”
Katherine recalls the quote from Sally Ride (the first American woman in space) that the focus shouldn’t be that she was a woman, but the “fact that we’re talking about it means that there is an issue and therefore it’s good that we’re talking about it.”
Katherine holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) – Aeronautical Engineering (Space) and a Bachelor of Science (Advanced) – Physics from the University of Sydney. When we talk about how the latest statistics from Engineering Australia found that only 17.7% of engineering graduates are women, she says that she hopes young women seeing more female representation in the field will encourage them to pursue a career in this space.
“I take it very seriously that I have a platform to help demonstrate to young women and people of all sorts of diversity in that there is a place for them in STEM, there is a place for them in space and in any other field they wish to pursue,” she says.
“It might not be the simplest road, but if they want to pursue it, they should absolutely do it without hesitation.”