Flavio answers “Am I the only one who found Mark Watney...”

Ariel asked this question about The Martian:

Am I the only one who found Mark Watney (and well, the rest of the book too really...) to be rather sexist?

Flavio All the women in the book are described as smart and competent:

* Commander Melissa Lewis is level-headed in emergencies, a good leader who puts the cr…moreAll the women in the book are described as smart and competent:

* Commander Melissa Lewis is level-headed in emergencies, a good leader who puts the crew's well-being before hers, and a Navy servicewoman who "tipped two-hundred-pound men out of their bunk". Her orders are obeyed without discussion.

* Beth Johanssen is "a woman who had survived the centrifuge, the vomit comet, hard-landing drills and 10k runs. A woman who fixed a simulated MDV computer failure while being spun around upside-down".

According to Jack Trevor, "Beth Johanssen is a great programmer" (Trevor devised a fiendishly clever Rover hack, so coming from him that's really high praise).

* Annie Montrose is "confident, high-ranking, beautiful, and universally respected within NASA" (note that "beautiful" is in the third place, and this is in the envious eyes of Mindy Park anyway).

Annie doesn't hesitate to berate Ted Sanders, the administrator of NASA (she tells to his face "You are a fucking coward", among other things).

* Mindy Park has a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering; she starts out as shy and nervous, but when she's thrown into meetings with people "four levels of management above her" she holds her own and is complimented on by the administrator of NASA ("You had an immediate answer,” Teddy said. “Good. I like it when people are organized")

Her worth is constantly recognized by Venkat Kapoor and the only time her abilities are questioned by Mitch Henderson, he is quickly shot down and apologizes immediately. She gets more self-confident as the story progresses, to the point that she talks back to Kapoor (he remarks "I remember when you were shy").

Notes: she's never described as "ugly" in the book; she considers herself less beautiful than Annie, but this is just her initial feeling of inadequacy. She's also never described as "Korean-American" (at least not in my e-book edition) as another reader commented. Park is mainly a Korean, English and Scottish surname.

A note about emotional outbursts: Mindy and Johanssen are described as "sobbing quietly" in two different scenes; in another Mark Watney "[...] sat down in the dirt and cried. Bawled like a little kid for several minutes. I finally settled down to mild sniffling".

Mark constantly tries to embarass his crewmates by pushing whatever buttons he feels might work for them, so he deliberately sounds sexist when he writes to Johanssen (but not to Lewis).

He has nothing but respect for his female crewmates in his thoughts (the description I quoted about Johanssen comes from his monologues) and he names a Martian geological feature “Lewis Valley, after our fearless leader".

To cap it all off, Andy Weir passes the Bechdel Test: Johanssen and Lewis have conversations that aren't about men (they talk about a nuclear reactor's power levels and how to hack interplanetary communication systems, among other things).
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