It’s demeaning and ruining her greatest achievement in life by being shit colleauges. It immediately sets the relation between her and other astronauts and basically tells her that her only worth is cooking.
I’m assuming they had all worked together for some years previously, did it really ruin this achievement? Did it ruin their working relationship? Or are you projecting how you would feel, or how you think she should feel?
She was the first person to weld in space, I think as far as breaking stereotypes go, you can’t really top that.
I suppose I see this as a joke about stereotypes to the one person in the world (or off the world) that it applies to least, rather than sexism.
I read that she replied “I assumed you would be doing the cooking”, and they joked back “don’t worry, we’ll make you something”, to me it just seems like colleagues joking around that we are all reading too much into 40 years later.
This is true, I remember one colleague who loved his car more than anything, had it as his desktop background, and went to car shows at weekends.
On his birthday during lunch we filled it with happy birthday balloons, floor to ceiling and watched out the window as he tried to work out what to do with them, how to get in and get home. I think that was the last time I truly laughed at work.
He came in to get some scissors to burst the balloons and called us bastards, but he was laughing just as much as we were.