NASA first planned to have extra-small, small, medium, large and extra-large suits. For budget reasons, the extra-small, small and extra-large suits were cut. However, many of the male astronauts could not fit into the large suits, so the bigger size was brought back.

The smaller sizes never were.

Cady Coleman, an astronaut who has flown on two space shuttles and traveled to the space station , stands 5 feet 4 inches tall and remains the smallest person to ever qualify for a spacewalk. While she was training in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, she had to improvise padding to wear inside her spacesuit.

Without that, smaller people would have an air bubble inside their suits that would make them spin in the lab’s pool as if a beach ball were strapped to their stomachs. It would not be a problem in space, Ms. Coleman told me. “But the N.B.L. was where people decided if you had what it takes to do a spacewalk,” she said.

And complaints? Well, no one else previously had that problem, so it must just be the person who complained. As a result, this gender bias became a mistake that we did not learn from, because the female astronauts compensated.