Skirts and Ladders 'Computing is too important to be left to men' — Karen Spärck Jones

“Basically, all my life I’d been told you can’t do that because you’re female. So I guess I just didn’t pay any attention.” – Shannon Lucid

Almost every male-dominated scientific discipline I know has a 'Women in...' group to go along with it. Women in Aerospace was established over 20 years ago, unsurprisingly in the US, to support the American women who were fortunate enough to take advantage of the industry spawned by NASA.

Women in Aerospace Europe was only founded earlier this year, when some enterprising women noticed that while there were some organisations which actually had very good gender ratios - around 50:50 - they still had the issue of low number of women in senior leadership positions.

I'm not sure that this is something that an organisation like this can fix. Their mission and vision are delightfully generic:

• Be a networking platform for women in leading positions in aerospace and other technological areas.
• Foster and promote the interests of women working in aerospace.
• Promote and improve the access of females to technical areas and the space sector.
• Advance aerospace education in schools and universities.
• Advocate the further investment in space projects in the political environment.
• Cooperate for the improvement and stabilization of the position of women in the aerospace profession.
• Be an ambassador for space in society, culture and philosophy.

I don't disagree with any of it, and I believe the first three points are definitely what it's all about. The other four are nice, but I'm not sure how they fit in as part of this network's remit. They obviously are useful in that they form solid things for the network to focus on, and they can use these points as conduits for the women that they engage. But part of me thinks that there should be someone else - a greater body, with men and women - that focus on these things, and act as ambassadors that educate, and also happen to support each other.

I'm often asked where the men's network is, and I usually flippantly reply 'look around you'. But, in truth, what I want is a people network. I want to see us get to a point where all people that are aspiring for progression, that want to get involved in development programmes in schools, that want to speak out about their experiences, have this available to turn to.

It's sort of happening already in some areas, where you have the chartered institutes acting as the umbrella organisation, and sometimes there are committees within that, and that seems to make sense. So that raises the question: when do independent women's networks become redundant?