1,- 1Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy
- 2Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London, UK
- 3The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
We will present the demographics of scientists in ESA (European Space Agency) Science Programme’s missions and discuss how this trend changed over time.
A study by [1] analyzed the participation of women scientists in 10 ESA Solar System missions over a period of 38 years. Being part of a spacecraft mission science team can be considered a proxy to measure the "success" in the field. Participation of women in PI (Principal Investigators) teams varied between 4 % and 25 %, with several missions having no women in the PI teams. The percentage of female scientists as Co-I (Co-Investigators) was always less than 16 %. This number is lower than the percentage of women in the International Astronomical Union from all ESA's Member State (24 %), which can give us an indication of the percentage of women in the field.
More recently, [2] and [3] investigated the demographics for PI and Co-PI (where appropriate) for a total of 28 ESA missions. They collected information regarding the institution, location, “academic age” (years since PhD) and gender.
In this work, we wish to go one step further, and analyze the demographics of Co-I for the whole ESA Science Programme’s fleet.
Some difficulties we are encountering are: 1) to find the original team members, as often new members are added over time, 2) determining the institution and the “academic age” at the time when the mission was selected, and 3) identifying the gender, if no self-declarations are available. For this study, we did not consider gender identities outside the male/female binary.
Detailed statistics represent only the first step to highlight possible bias and gaps that may affect the achievement of an equal and inclusive scientific environment.
References
[1] Piccialli, A., et al.: Participation of women scientists in ESA solar system missions: a historical trend, Adv. Geosci., 53, 169–182, https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-53-169-2020, 2020.
[2] Parmar, A., et al., Was that … good?, Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 65, Issue 4, August 2024, Pages 4.30–4.35, https://doi.org/10.1093/astrogeo/atae048
[3] Zarnecki, J., Parmar, A. (2025). Payload Provision to the ESA Science Programme. In: Parmar, A. (eds) ESA Science Programme Missions. ISSI Scientific Report Series, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-69004-4_3
How to cite: Piccialli, A., Parmar, A., and Zarnecki, J.: Demographics of ESA’s Science Programme’s missions, EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2025, Helsinki, Finland, 7–12 Sep 2025, EPSC-DPS2025-2061, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc-dps2025-2061, 2025.
