When she was a little girl, Dr. Mae Jemison dreamed of going to space, a goal she discussed with very few people.
“As a little girl, I remember being really excited about space,” Jemison told a crowd of more than 700 Wednesday afternoon at the Auburn University Hotel and Dixon Conference Center. “And people were trying to explain to me why women couldn’t go into space. I always thought they were full of it.”
Jemison delivered Auburn’s Extraordinary Women Lecture, where she discussed inclusion and took questions from the audience.
The Decatur native, who was raised in Chicago, made history when she flew into space on Sept. 12, 1992, aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor as the first African-American female astronaut.
“Dr. Mae Carol Jemison truly is a renaissance woman. As a physician, engineer, educator, entrepreneur, astronaut and accomplished dancer, she has excelled in everything she has attempted,” said Jane DiFolco Parker, president of the Auburn University Foundation.
People are also reading…
Prior to being selected as one of 15 out of 2,000 applicants for NASA’s astronaut training program and six years as a NASA astronaut, Jemison spent more than two years as a medical doctor in the Peace Corps.
Eager listeners lined the ballroom’s walls and spilled onto the floor to hear Jemison speak.
Though she briefly discussed space, Jemison focused the majority of her hour-long lecture on education and educational equality for boys and girls.
“People use the word ‘genius’ for men all the time,” Jemison said, adding the top Google search entries for parents of girls and boys vary wildly from “Is my son a genius?” to “Is my daughter ugly?”
Mercury 13, Jemison said, a program in the late 1950s, put women though some of the same tests as were being developed for male astronauts. At that time, Jemison said doctors thought women would be better suited to be astronauts because they were smaller, boasted healthier hearts and would fare better in a psychologically stressful environment.
Jemison then turned her attention to education, telling the crowd science is hands-on and learned by experiments. She touted the importance of access to things like wet labs in schools to expose children to the sciences.
“Interest in science is colorblind; it’s gender blind,” she said. “All children come out interested in science.”
She added children pick up on expectations and the importance the adults in their lives put on education.
“Children live up or down to our expectations. If we expect them to do well, they’ll usually do well. If we expect them to fail, they’ll usually sort of stoop down to where we expect them to be,” Jemison said.
“Expectation isn’t even what’s in a classroom; it’s what’s in the environment. So if we say that we want to run our school systems by the money we make off of lotteries, think about the undercurrent message it sends. It says that your education really isn’t that important,” she continued. “Could you imagine if we talked about running Medicare based on funding we get from a lottery, or the Defense Department based on the funding we get from a lottery? And if we have kids going into schools and the schools are so poorly kept that they’re afraid to go in, that’s an underlying message.”
Instead, Jemison advocated fostering interest in the sciences in all ages, genders and races.
“We need the full range of all the talents that we have to solve the problems of today.”