So, who will she be? NASA's current roster of 12 female astronauts are aged between 40 and 53, and are former military pilots, medical doctors and scientists who were picked from among thousands of applicants since the late 1990s.

Recently, a number of prominent women have left their posts as company heads. All of them have been replaced by men, a blow for diversity since fewer than five percent of leaders of the S&P 500 largest enterprises are now women, down from 5.4 percent in 2017.

The allocation of a specific gender to an object or feature of our landscape might not be a result of conceptual categorisation and this is supported by an examination of noun classes and "gender shifts" across different grammatical systems. Is a French car (female) different in any way to a Spanish (male) car or is it just a question of grammar without connotation or semantics?

"As part of our mentoring and professional development activities, we are not always directly connecting our PROGRESS students with faculty, but there is something about their interaction with faculty members that is an important predictor in their intention to stay in the earth and environmental sciences," Fischer said. "That surprised us; we didn't expect this to be so important."