Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to travel to space, faced persistent challenges rooted in racial and gender bias at nearly every stage of her career. From dismissive professors in college to skeptical advisors in medical school to institutional prejudice even after her historic 1992 spaceflight, the obstacles she encountered were both systemic and deeply personal.
Dismissed in the Classroom
Jemison grew up on the South Side of Chicago and entered Stanford University at just 16 years old. The academic rigor wasn’t her biggest hurdle. Professors in the engineering department didn’t take her seriously. They would skip over her when calling on students, or if they did engage with her comments, they’d dismiss them and later present the same ideas as their own. For a Black woman studying engineering in the late 1970s, this kind of erasure was the norm, not the exception. In 1970, only about 3 percent of engineers in the United States were women, and just 2 percent of the entire STEM workforce was Black.
Teachers and school staff had discouraged Jemison from pursuing science even earlier, during her childhood in Chicago. Speaking years later to students at her alma mater, she described how people tried to limit her: “Sometimes people want to tell you to act or to be a certain way. Sometimes people want to limit you because of their own limited imaginations.”
Pushback During Medical School
After earning her degrees in chemical engineering and African American studies from Stanford, Jemison went on to Cornell Medical College. There, she hit a different kind of resistance. When she decided to join the Peace Corps after graduating, none of her advisors supported the plan. They pushed her toward residency and a conventional medical career, telling her the Peace Corps would be a step backward. Jemison went anyway, serving as a medical officer in Sierra Leone and Liberia from 1983 to 1985, where she managed health care for Peace Corps volunteers and embassy staff. The experience broadened her perspective, but it came without institutional encouragement.
Breaking Into NASA
Getting selected as a NASA astronaut is one of the most competitive processes in any profession. Since 1959, the agency has chosen only 360 astronaut candidates total, drawn from thousands of applicants per cycle. By 2021, a single class attracted more than 12,000 applications. Of those 360 total selections across NASA’s history, just 61 have been women.
Jemison first applied to the astronaut program in 1985. She was not selected. The Challenger disaster in January 1986 delayed the next round of selections, but she applied again and was chosen in 1987 as part of a 15-person class. She was the only African American woman. The path required not just extraordinary qualifications (she held both engineering and medical degrees and had international field experience) but the persistence to reapply after an initial rejection during a period when NASA’s entire crewed program was in crisis.
Bias That Followed Her Into Space and Beyond
Jemison flew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in September 1992, spending nearly eight days in orbit conducting experiments on weightlessness, motion sickness, and bone cell research. The mission made history, but it didn’t shield her from prejudice.
After returning from space, Jemison visited an elementary school where the principal told her he planned to have male teachers inform students about Space Camp opportunities, because men are “more knowledgeable in science.” This was said directly to a woman who had just orbited the Earth 127 times as a NASA mission specialist. The encounter illustrated something Jemison has spoken about repeatedly: institutional bias doesn’t yield to individual achievement. It persists in assumptions people carry regardless of the evidence in front of them.
Challenges After NASA
Jemison left NASA in 1993 and founded The Jemison Group, a technology consulting firm, and later a technology camp for students. In 2012, she took on leadership of the 100 Year Starship project, a initiative originally seeded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to foster research toward eventual interstellar travel. The project came with significant skepticism. With NASA scaling back its crewed space programs at the time, the idea of planning for a trip to the stars struck many observers as audacious, even impractical. The seed funding was just $500,000, a tiny sum meant to jumpstart what would need to become a much larger, self-sustaining effort. Leading a project with enormous ambitions, minimal funding, and public trepidation required the same resilience Jemison had been building since childhood.
The Broader Pattern
What stands out across Jemison’s career is not any single dramatic obstacle but the relentless accumulation of smaller ones. Professors ignoring her contributions. Advisors discouraging unconventional choices. A school principal assuming a male teacher would better explain space science to children. Each incident on its own might seem minor. Together, they represent the experience of navigating institutions that were not designed to include Black women, and that often actively resisted their presence.
Jemison has framed these challenges not as personal grievances but as systemic realities that require awareness. “One has to be mindful of preconceived ideas and perceptions of individuals,” she has said. Her response, consistently, was not to fight each bias head-on but to keep moving forward through it, building a career that spanned medicine, engineering, space exploration, education, and entrepreneurship despite every signal that she didn’t belong.