If we are currently thinking again about what can be done about the fact that women are always plagued by underrepresentation in this country where jobs are particularly important, highly paid or close to science and technology, then it may at least be an interesting inspiration to take a look at the Let the Middle East wander - admittedly, not a region that would be the first to think of in search of impulses to achieve equality.
The United Arab Emirates, however, are campaigning very aggressively these days with an astonishing quota of women in view of the imminent start of their “Hope” Mars mission: 34 percent of those involved in the project are women, among the mission's scientists it is as much as 80 percent.
In the traditionally male-dominated space business in particular, such numbers are anything but natural.
The Hope probe is to orbit our neighboring planet from 2021 and explore the atmospheric conditions there at different times of the day and year.
Only the best minds
Anyone who asks the scientific mission leader Sarah Al Amiri about the high proportion of women in the mission, a thirty-three-year-old computer scientist with experience in satellite construction and science minister of the Emirates since 2017, will be provided with further unexpected figures. Seventy percent of all university degrees in the Emirates went to women and 56 percent of all degrees in the math, science and technology Mint subjects. The high proportion of women on the Mars team is only natural. You yourself have never seen technical professions as a male domain. She was confronted with this view for the first time at the age of seventeen - by an Australian friend of the family.
According to Al Amiri, another factor for the high proportion of women could be that the space sector, which was only launched in 2006 in her country, is new enough not to have developed well-established structures that favor men. This creates the necessary openness to hire people based on their talent regardless of their gender. That was exactly the approach of the Hope Mission: They simply recruited the best minds among university graduates in the natural and engineering sciences. That doesn't sound like a wrong strategy. If such an unprejudiced, exclusively qualification-based selection can then lead to an eighty percent share of women on the part of missiologists,then perhaps the men should rethink the advantages of a quota.