Update: AAS CSWA Survey of Workplace Climtae

Update: The AAS CSWA Survey on Workplace Climate will be closing on March 15th (at midnight, EST).  We have received over 400 responses already and would like to thank everyone who has participated thus far.  For those who have not filled out the survey, please do so as soon as possible.  Also, for those who volunteered for the follow-up interview portion, Dr. Kate Clancy will be contacting you in the next month to arrange those interviews.  Preliminary results will be presented this summer.

For more information:

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) is conducting a survey on Workplace Climate. The CSWA wants to learn if  members of the astronomical community encounter negative language, or experience verbal or physical altercations on the basis of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability status, or race and ethnicity. The survey is designed to request information during the respondent's current position and previous position (if the respondent has changed positions within the last five years). This information is requested in order to understand if astronomers and planetary scientists encounter varying workplace climates at different stages of their career.

Please help us in our pursuit to better understand how workplace climate impacts the members of the astronomical community. Go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CSWA_Workplace_Climate_Survey to complete a confidential survey. We appreciate your input and welcome participation from all members of the astronomical and planetary scientist community over the age of 18.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for February 27, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of February 27, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. CSWA's STATUS newsletter for January 2015 now available online

2. Future Directions in the Work-Family Equation

3. A recipe for culture change

4. Feminist writers are so besieged by online abuse that some have begun to retire

5. STEM survey for postgraduate women (participation deadline is TODAY)

6. First annual Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science Symposium (ERES) will be held May 28 & 29, 2015

7. 12 ways women unknowingly sabotage their success

8. Now Accepting Applications for the 2015 Blewett Fellowship

9. Job Opportunities

10. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

11. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

12. Access to Past Issues

A recipe for culture change

If you could design your ideal workplace, what would it look like?  If you are reading this blog, chances are that your description includes more than a high salary and state of the art facilities and includes being valued for your ability and treated fairly and respectfully by others.

Recently I served on a visiting committee that privately interviewed every staff and faculty member of an academic department.  If I had to design my ideal workplace, I could not have come up with a more satisfied group.  Everyone loves their job and feels welcomed and respected.  Inclusion, diversity, and excellence are seamlessly interwoven.  My ideal workplace would look a lot like that.

During the past two years I was given the gift of time (about 18 months) to study my university in depth to make recommendations for advancing a respectful and caring community.  The result is a report currently under discussion by faculty, staff, postdocs, students and alumni.  Some of the recommendations, such as universal unconscious bias training, would, I believe, be quite impactful if they spread widely.  That particular recommendation is based on groundbreaking work done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google.

Business guru Peter Drucker is said to have remarked, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."  What he meant is that the unwritten rules of how people interact and what they feel is normal for their organization will make it difficult to implement organizational change unless the tacit assumptions are spoken aloud.

Shifting a culture requires that it first be understood.  Efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion often are hindered by culture.  What if we made culture part of the solution instead of part of the problem?

That is the approach I followed in writing this report.  It's not the usual one.  But isn't that what researchers do?  We experiment and innovate.  When empathy is added to this equation, we have the ingredients for culture change.  Submit your recipes!  And let's use culture to our advantage.

Future Directions in the Work-Family Equation

An NPR blog by Maanvi Singh introduced me to an interesting article about gender equality in the workplace and home.  It is by David Pedulla and Sarah Thébaud, faculty members at UT Austin and UC Santa Barbara, respectively.  The article is titled "Can We Finish the Revolution?  Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint" and published this year in the American Sociological Review.

The authors performed a survey to address the question of how much gender-specific workplace cultures and policies determine the roles that men and women play in their households.  Even when couples have gender-equality ideals, workplace constraints may force them to adopt traditional roles of men as the earner and women as the caregiver.  The motivation for the study is to understand why the gender revolution has "stalled".  More women are in the workforce, but are still highly underrepresented tin top positions.   Examples given are that women make up only 4% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 3% of members of Congress.

The study was of young unmarried women and men aged 18 to 32.  The participants were asked their preference for traditional roles (man - primary earner, woman - primary caregiver) vs egalitarian roles.  They were asked to choose between these options under the two assumptions of unsupportive and supportive workplace policies for dual-earner, dual-caregiver arrangements.  One of the primary results is shown in the table here that I made from the data presented.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for February 20, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of February 20, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Choosing the Best

2. Leadership and the Myers-Briggs Personality Test

3. Think Again About Gender Gap in Science

4. The Sex Spectrum

5. Do Teachers Discourage Girls from Math and Science?

6. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

7. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

8. Access to Past Issues

Leadership and the Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Women of different personality types

In the wake of Kelly Korrick’s post, Becoming a Leader, and my own interest, On Leadership, I took the Myers-Briggs personality test. I know several colleagues, family members, and supervisors who have taken the test as part of their management training. The test is available free on-line. I took this version, which is comprised of 60 yes/no questions. I’ve seen other variations, but they are all similar and take only a few minutes. The final results give you a series of letters indicating your personality types as well as the strength in each of the following categories:

 

•Extraverted (E) vs. Introverted (I),
•Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N),
•Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)
•Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P)

 

I don’t need a test to tell me that I am Introverted (I), but it also told me the strength of this characteristic. The Extravert-Introvert dimension is a continuum:

Extravert [100% - - - 0% - - - 100%] Introvert

I was reasonably, but not overwhelmingly, introverted.

 

Sensing-Intuition preference represents the method by which one perceives information: Sensing (S) means an individual mainly relies on concrete, actual information. Intuition (N) means a person relies upon their conception about things based on their understanding of the world.

 

Thinking-Feeling preference indicates the way an individual processes information. Thinking (T) preference means an individual makes decisions based on logical reasoning. Feeling (F) preference means that an individual's base for decisions is mainly feelings and emotions.

 

Judging-Perceiving preference in more complex and involves both incoming and outgoing information. It is important to understand that Judging (J) is not the same as “judgmental,” which was my own first (incorrect) impression of its meaning.

Choosing the Best

And so the committee met to choose between the two finalists.

“It's easy!” announced Professor Tist. “The letter from Dr. Darlon states plainly that she is the best exolonomist of her generation!”

“No, no!” rebutted Professor Tast. “You are not an expert in her subfield like me. Darlon doesn’t really think she is the best, he was just being supportive of a young scientist."

“He was?” asked Tist.