Surrounded by white men on a daily basis, Farah Alibay is committed to increasing diversity and the visibility of women in her field.
Farah Alibay grew up in Quebec and has worked at NASA for the past six years.
“I got so worried watching the movie that my parents fast forwarded all the way to the end to show me that the astronauts had survived,” she told HuffPost Quebec. “Afterward, we watched the rest of the movie. It really fascinated me to see the engineers working together, even though they were all men.”
When Alibay was 13, her family moved to England for her father’s work as an engineer. She went on to study aerospace engineering at Cambridge University. While working toward her master’s degree, she was the only woman in the entire lab — a place where finding a women’s restroom was a challenge. Currently, Alibay is working on the Mars rover for the 2020 mission, scheduled for launch in July. Once it lands, she and her team will handle all the operations required to get the vehicle up and running on the red planet. The goal is to better understand the planet’s evolution, determine if there was ever life on Mars, and work on preparing the planet for a future human visit.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m the right person for the job, and I think that I’m going to have that feeling for my entire career. It’s important to talk about it because a lot of women feel that way,” she said.Alibay is trying to shake up the standards for gender and diversity in the aerospace field.
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