At Rocket Women, we're driven by this powerful thought

What would the world look like if every girl had the chance to reach their potential and change the world through STEM?

Rocket Women aims to provide inspirational women globally with a platform to spread their advice and ensure that their voices are heard. By featuring stories of successful women in STEM, we want Rocket Women to give young women and girls globally the realisation that they can be astronauts, scientists and engineers or whatever they aim to be.

We’re interviewing women around the world in STEM, particularly in space, and posting the interviews on Rocket Women, along with advice and resources to show the next generation the impact they can make with a career in STEM.

Our goal is to empower young women to choose a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) and achieve their dreams, so that we can improve the current percentage of female engineering talent.

In 2016, just 23% of science and technology workers in Canada were women. According to Statistics Canada, women currently make up just 19% of students studying engineering in Canada.

In the UK, only 12% of the engineering workforce is female and according to recent research from the Royal Academy of Engineering, only 7.8% of engineering professionals are from BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) backgrounds, compared to 12% of the UK population.

Rocket Women believes that the lack of gender and racial diversity in STEM industries, including the space sector, is not only an issue of inequality, but affects the engineering that we do and the systems we create. We need to enable engineering as a profession to reflect more of society to prevent unconscious biases from being implemented into design. Now, more than ever, we need 100% of the talent available to solve the really hard problems we’re facing in the world.

Rocket Women aims not only to provide inspiration, but create a supportive community of women in space and related industries through our online platforms and regular public outreach events in the UK, Europe and Canada – including science festivals, engineering industry events, classroom-focused projects in collaboration with schools, in addition to providing teacher training workshops and space-focused educational resource development.

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Our team

Vinita Marwaha Madill Featured in the This is Engineering Campaign Photo: Harry Parvin, Copyright: This Is Engineering, Royal Academy of Engineering (Creative Commons)

Vinita Marwaha Madill

Founder

Vinita is a strong advocate for women in STEM, with a drive to inspire the next generation. She’s passionate about human spaceflight and exploration and was recently based as a contractor at the European Space Agency (ESA) working on future human spaceflight projects as a Space Operations Engineer. Vinita presently works as a Project Manager at a Canadian space company focused on robotics and lunar operations. Rocket Women was founded by Vinita in 2012.

Katarina Eriksson, Designer, Märka Design

Katarina Erikson

Owner & Designer, Märka Design

Katarina has worked on a number of projects related to space and design, from graphic design to being involved with the ISU Space Studies Program and the space architecture courses at Lund University in Sweden and Design School Kolding (DK), as well as facilitating space design workshops. 

Katarina and Märka Design have created our fantastic new logo and our stunning apparel designs, with each purchase of our apparel supporting Rocket Women’s scholarship for women in science and engineering.

Veronica Chatrath

Communications Team LEAD

Veronica is a Canadian MASc. student at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies. She obtained her BSc. in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. Veronica is an advocate for women and youth in STEM, and is excited to be a part of Rocket Women. She has done internships at the Canadian Space Agency, Mission Control Space Services and MDA, all sparking her interest in space and robotics.

Mansi Joshi

Mansi Joshi

communications Team contributor & Writer

Mansi is a recent aerospace engineering graduate in the UK, currently working within industry. Throughout her academic and professional journey she has actively strived towards getting young people, especially young women, involved in STEM. She has a vast array of experience from organising and delivering interactive workshops, to speaking in schools about her journey as well as being invited to speak at several leading space industry events. She is a strong advocate for women in STEM and drives towards equal representation within the industry.

Supreet (Sue) Kaur

Communications Team Contributor & Writer

Supreet is a human factors and space systems engineer from the United States. She completed her Bachelors in Industrial & Systems Engineering at San Jose State University (California, USA), while doing her undergraduate research at NASA Ames Research Center on the Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 (ATD-2) project.

Supreet is a Brooke Owens Fellow (Class of 2019), and a space educator and writer. She is currently completing her Masters of Space Studies at the International Space University (Strasbourg, France) and an in-house consultant on advanced systems engineering at Valispace (Bremen, Germany). 

Rikhi Roy, Rocket Women Contributor

Rikhi Roy

COMMUNICATIONS TEAM CONTRIBUTOR & wRITER

Rikhi is a graduate student at Georgia Tech studying Aerospace Engineering in the United States. She is passionate about systems safety, and advocating for the wellness of gender-minorities and international students in STEM. 

She is the founder of Singapore’s first ‘Women Leaders in Aerospace’ conference and Udaan, a platform for international students in the aerospace industry in the United States. She is also the Women of Aeronautics and Astronautics DEI chair, a 2019 Brooke Owens Fellow, a competitive Indian classical dancer and wellness blogger. You can follow her at @RikhiRoy on Twitter and Instagram and read her work at www.a-balancing-act.com

Lauren McGarry

Lauren McGarry

Communications Team CONTRIBUTOR & WRITER

Lauren is an engineer at the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Northern Ireland, working specifically in robotics, machine learning, and digital twins. She completed her master’s and PhD, in Aerospace Engineering, at Queen’s University Belfast. Lauren has been involved in the International Space University Space Studies program as both a student and a staff member. Lauren’s commitment to promoting women in space extends beyond her professional career. She proudly serves as a STEM ambassador, inspiring the next generation of female scientists and engineers. Furthermore, she volunteers her time at the Royal Aeronautical Society Belfast branch, where she helps organise events and lectures aimed at fostering a thriving aerospace community in Northern Ireland.