theverge | No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a
massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by
the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter
made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that
anyone might be upset about her creation. Taylor apologized on Friday
during a live ESA broadcast for wearing the shirt, stating that "the
shirt I wore this week... I made a big mistake and I offended many
people, and I'm very sorry about this." Still, Taylor's personal apology
doesn't make up for the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him
from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50
percent of the world's population. No one asked him to take it off,
because presumably they didn't think about it. It wasn't worth worrying
about.
This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering
certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don't
feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague's
office and they know they aren't respected. They hear comments about
"bitches" while out at a bar with fellow science students, and they
decide to change majors. And those are the women who actually make it
that far. Those are the few who persevered even when they were
discouraged from pursuing degrees in physics, chemistry, and math
throughout high school. These are the women who forged on despite the
fact that they were told by elementary school classmates and the media
at large that girls who like science are nerdy and unattractive. This is
the climate women who dream of working at NASA or the ESA come up
against, every single day. This shirt is representative of all of that,
and the ESA has yet to issue a statement or apologize for that.
