It’s the kind of scene you just can’t make up.

The year is 1983, and NASA is about to launch its seventh space shuttle mission. It’s the second space flight for the shuttle Challenger. It’s the first flight for 32-year-old Sally Ride—or for any American woman, period.

Ride is composed and professional at the pre-flight press conference, where she stands with her four male crewmates. She’s an intensely private person and would rather avoid the spotlight, but all eyes are on her and she’s ready to handle the scrutiny with grace and tact.

A hand goes up. A reporter has a question.

“Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?”

What?

This moment deserves some context. Sally Ride holds a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford and has researched both astrophysics and free electron laser physics. She joined NASA in 1978 and served as ground-based capsule communicator on two missions before helping develop the space shuttle’s robot arm. She’s been chosen for the seventh mission because she and only one other crewmate are skilled enough to operate the robot arm. She has the kind of credentials most scrawny reporters can’t even spell on their notepads.

And they’re asking her questions like, “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?”

Her response is as succinct as it is poignant: “How come nobody ever asks Rick [her crewmate] those questions?”

But of course, she knows the answer. In the 60s, job postings for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers would sometimes contain the phrase, “Women need not apply,” and actually mean it.

Women like Karen Purcell, author of the recent book “Unlocking Your Brilliance: Smart Strategies for Women to Thrive in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math,” can look back on their careers and identify times when people would see them on job sites with male bosses and presume the women were assistants, not engineers. Even after Purcell pushed through the initial shock and got to work, people would still look to her boss for confirmation of everything she said, as if scientific facts can only be true if they come from the mouth of a man.

But that was the old days, right? Things are better now… right?

A study from the Society of Women Engineers surveyed 6,000 women and men who earned engineering degrees between 1985 and 2003. By 2006, one in four women were either employed in a non-STEM field or unemployed altogether. Only one in ten men were in the same boat.

In another study by the U.S. Economics and Statistics Administration, it was found that 40 percent of men who hold STEM degrees are employed in STEM jobs, compared to only 26 percent of women. The remaining 74 percent of women either can’t find a STEM job that will hire them, or they can’t stand to stay at the menial jobs they do find.

Given the insulting experiences of women like Ride and Purcell, I can’t blame them.

At that pre-flight press conference, Ride had this to say about the misguided, gender-centered questions she fielded: “It may be too bad that our society isn’t further along and that this is such a big deal.”

There are two sides to this simple comment. Obviously it’s regrettable when people’s minds are so clouded by gender misconceptions that they can’t see women’s true accomplishments. It’s essential to continue praising the example of women like Ride to overcome these faulty stereotypes.

However, strong women like Ride also look forward to the day when women will no longer have to defend themselves from undeserved negativity in the first place. When basic assumptions of our society are not based on a masculine perspective, when being female is no longer considered an anomaly from the male norm, then women will enjoy true and lasting equality.

After her career at NASA, Ride devoted her life to achieving that exact goal. She co-founded Sally Ride Science in 2001 to create entertaining science programs for students, particularly focusing on girls. Her love for her profession and her commitment to creating opportunities for girls made her an icon to scientists and women in general.

It really is the kind of story you just can’t make up.