"Ten years ago this was embraced by everyone, and seen as a win-win for all."
The Brooke Owens Fellowship seeks to increase female participation in aerospace engineering. Credit: Brooke Owens Fellowship
Last month a nonprofit that recognizes exceptional undergraduate women and gender minorities with space and aviation internships, the Brooke Owens Fellowship, announced its latest class of "Brookies."
This ninth class of 45 students was selected from more than 400 applications, and they will fan out to aerospace companies across the country, from large firms such as SpaceX and Blue Origin to smaller startups like Vast and Stoke. There they will be paired with executive-level mentors who will help launch their careers.
However there was a cloud hanging over this latest group of exceptional students: They may be the last class of Brookies to receive aerospace internships.
"Ten years ago this was embraced by everyone, and seen as a win-win for all," said Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA and co-founder of the Brooke Owens Fellowship. "But we're not sure we can continue under the new administration."
DEI is DOA
The reason for this is an executive order signed by President Trump on January 20 to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, or DEI. "Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great," the order states.
The Brooke Owens Fellowship, as well as other similar programs such as the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship for black undergraduates, partner with companies in the industry. The fellowship organizers screen hundreds of applications, creating a pool from which the companies can hire whomever they like as interns and provide mentorship. Most of the agreements for the 2025 class of "Brookies" were signed with companies prior to the issuance of the executive order. Another organization that promotes diverse internships, the Zed Factor Fellowship, started its screening process a little later and recently told prospective applicants it had made the "heartbreaking" decision to halt its selection of 2025 fellowships.
As part of the executive order, US companies with federal contracts and grants must certify that they no longer have any DEI hiring practices. Preferentially hiring some interns from a pool that includes women or minorities is such a practice. Effectively, then, any private aerospace company that receives federal funding, or intends to one day, would likely be barred under the executive order from engaging with these kinds of fellowships in the future.
US companies are scrambling to determine how best to comply with the executive order in many ways, said Emily Calandrelli, an engineer and prominent science communicator. After the order went into effect, some large defense contractor companies, including Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon) went so far as to cancel internal employee resource groups, including everything from group chats to meetings among women at the company that served to foster a sense of community. When Calandrelli asked Lockheed about this decision, the company confirmed it had "paused" these resource group activities to "align with the new executive order."
An unwelcoming environment
For women and minorities, Calandrelli said, this creates an unwelcoming environment.
"You want to go where you are celebrated and wanted, not where you are tolerated," she said. "That sense of belonging is going to take a hit. It's going to be harder to recruit women and keep women."
This is not just a problem for women and minorities, but for everyone, Calandrelli said. The aerospace industry is competing with others for top engineering talent. Prospective engineers who feel unwanted in aerospace, as well as women and minorities working for space companies today, may find the salary and environment more welcoming at Apple or Google or elsewhere in the tech industry. That's a problem for the US Space Force and other areas of the government seeking to ensure the US space industry retains its lead in satellite technology, launch, communications and other aspects of space that touch every part of life on Earth.
There is ample room for the space industry to grow its share of female engineers.
By various estimates, only about 15 percent of engineers in the US aerospace workforce are women. Calandrelli said it can be daunting, as a female engineer, to attend a space conference and wade into a sea of men in suits. Similarly, within space companies, it can feel isolating to be one of only a handful of women in a large meeting room. Male dominated industries also have something of an old-boys network. This is not necessarily nefarious, but there's a cycle by which men are more apt to hire, or recommend, someone they went to college with or remember from a fraternity.
Creating a new network
Programs like the Brooke Owens Fellowship help open up such a system for women. "We are creating our own network," Calandrelli said. Women who participate in fellowships often get hired by their companies after college, and then serve as mentors for future generations of students. There are now more than 350 Brookie alumni spanning all aspects of space and aviation.
Garver said she would like to continue the program, if possible. She—and to her knowledge, participants in the Brooke Owens Fellowship—have never felt negativity or hostility within the industry. Although SpaceX founder Elon Musk is heavily involved with the Trump administration and has spoken out against DEI, his company has sponsored dozens of Brookies and hired most of its interns. Prospective participants in the fellowship still often put SpaceX at the top of the list of companies they would like to work for.
Garver is convinced that women and minorities continue to be vastly underrepresented in the aerospace industry, and opening doors to strengthen the industry is a good thing.
"Is there a need for these kinds of fellowships today?" she said. "It would be great if there wasn’t."