
Men and Women Adapt Differently to Spaceflight (2014) - ericedge
https://www.nasa.gov/content/men-women-spaceflight-adaptation/
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emiliobumachar
"The groups observed that the disparity of spaceflight data available for men
and women who have flown in space – 477 men vs. 57 women as of June 2013 –
makes it difficult to derive concrete conclusions based on sex and gender
alone."

Statistics can't work like that, can it? It's surely _not_ harder to derive
concrete conclusions from a large, imbalanced 477-57 group than from a smaller
but balanced 57-57 group... right?

At the extreme, you could always take a random subsample of 57 men.

Note: I agree that imbalance is bad, I just disagree that it's bad for taking
the conclusions listed in the article and other similar conclusions.

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Amorymeltzer
Well, 57 isn't really that great of a number by itself. Especially given their
exposure to space is relatively transient (compared to, let's say, Earth-based
factors) and that you're looking for relatively rare outcomes (like radiation-
based issues), 57 is vastly under-powered.

Where the disparity is a real problem, though, is in the matching. You can't
just take a random sampling of men and women, you need the populations to
match. Think age, race, marriage status, educational achievement, military
experience, etc. With so few women, it's hard to get appropriately-matched
comparisons. Hence, from the summary:

>Female NASA space station astronauts are on average 2 years younger than male
astronauts. While there were no significant differences in the percentage of
male (76%) and female space station astronauts (69%) who were married, a
significantly greater percentage of male astronauts had at least one child
(67% versus 38%) and overall, men had more children than women. From a
professional perspective, female NASA space station astronauts have almost
twice as many doctorate-level degrees as their male counterparts (50% versus
28%); conversely male NASA space station astronauts had more military
experience (73% versus 39%). Sex and gender differences as well as these
social determinants could impact adaptation to spaceflight.

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Amorymeltzer
The radiation difference was one I was particularly interested in - fielded a
question on it at Bio.SE
[http://biology.stackexchange.com/a/10084/4101](http://biology.stackexchange.com/a/10084/4101)
\- but it's a good example of why this is important to study. Just as we saw
with heart attacks, where females exhibit different signs and symptoms than
males, this kind of study can drastically change our expectations as we look
toward longer-term space flight.

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danharaj
It's good that these differences are being studied before they are relevant.
It's better than the time gap between determining men's heart attack symptoms
and realizing that women experience different symptoms when they're having a
heart attack. A similar such an oversight could have threatened the viability
of a longer term space mission.

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yincrash
PBS Space Time made a video[1] that drew from this study to argue that it
makes sense to have the first mission to mars be all women because of the
issues in the study.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEagBK4Xb1w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEagBK4Xb1w)

