The guidelines for naming a planet’s surface features are coming under scrutiny for being biased towards men, as research shows fewer than 2% of Mars’s craters are named after women. An analysis of the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) database has revealed that only 32 out of 1,578 known Moon craters bear a woman’s name.
Annie Lennox, a doctoral researcher at The Open University, has published an open letter in the journal Nature Astronomy, expressing how the male-biased culture of naming planetary features inherently disadvantages women and marginalized groups. Lennox is urging the IAU to change its policies, which she says are biased towards cisgender white men.
Lennox’s research found that only 11.8% of craters on Mercury bear a female name, while Mars comes out the worst with only 1.8% of craters named after women. She also highlighted that all crater names in Venus have a female origin, but only 38% are named after actual women who made real contributions to society.
The issue, Lennox argues, is that the current conventions crystallize historic injustices and contribute to a lack of diversity within the nomenclature. She believes that the weighting of celebrity status over contribution inherently disadvantages women and marginalized groups regardless of the field.
While her research started with analyzing names of craters across planets, Lennox has now expanded her work to analyze every named feature in the solar system. Her goal is to bring attention to the lack of representation of women in the field of planetary feature naming.
As the conversation around gender equality and representation continues to gain momentum in various sectors, Lennox’s work sheds light on the biases that exist even in seemingly unrelated fields like planetary science and astronomy. It remains to be seen whether the IAU will take steps to address the imbalance in the naming of planetary features.