AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 30, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 30, 2014
eds. Nick Murphy, Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner & Meredith Hughes

This week's issues:

1. Change in AASWOMEN Editors

2. NASA Astrophysics Senior Review

3. Harassment from Students

4. ADVICE: Suggestions for Serving on a Scientific Organizing Committee

5. Female Privilege?

6. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Tenured Faculty

7. Response: Gender Bias in Oral Exams

8. Fellowship Opportunities

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 of the AASWomen Newsletter

NASA Astrophysics Senior Review

 

 

The main panel of the 2014 NASA Astrophysics Senior Review had 10 members; none were women. I asked Paul Hertz what had happened to diversity. This is his formal response.

 

Response to Joan Schmelz, Chair, Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy 

Paul Hertz Director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters May 28, 2014 

 

 

 

The Senior Review of NASA Operating Missions is the formal review of operating missions and projects carried out every two years as required by law. The purpose of the Senior Review is to: 

• Prioritize continued funding of the operating missions and projects; 
• Define an implementation approach to achieve astrophysics strategic objectives;
• Provide programmatic and budgetary direction to missions and projects for the upcoming two fiscal years; and, 
• Issue initial funding guidelines for the following two fiscal years. 

  

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Tenured Faculty

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Caroline Simpson, an astronomer turned professor. She is a tenured faculty in astronomy at an urban, minority serving, 'Research High Activity' institution. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.

Female Privilege?

Women in Science
via the Smithsonian

Author's Note: There are some important reactions, corrections, and commentary in the comments section of this post. 

This blog focuses on a lot of the challenges of being a woman in astronomy (and STEM in general). We talk about sexism (of both the explicit and benevolent variety), unconscious and implicit biases, the wage gap, the gender gap, the two-body problem, the leaky pipeline, the impostor complex, work-life-family balance issues, sexual harassment... the list goes on and on. But are there any advantages to being a woman in STEM? Is there female privilege?

In April, Thought Catalog published two pieces about Female Privilege one from a "male perspective" and one from a "female perspective" (I use quotes because I doubt all males reading this blog will agree with the male perspective or vice versa).

In general, talking about female privilege is problematic as this post very eloquently describes. Much of the general "advantages" to being a woman are actually in fact benevolent sexism or other byproducts of the disadvantages that we have in society in general.

ADVICE: Suggestions for Serving on a Scientific Organizing Committee

Today’s advice comes from Nancy Brickhouse, the Senior Science Advisor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a member of the AAS council. Her research interests include solar and stellar coronal physics, plasma spectral modeling, atomic data for astrophysics, UV to X-ray spectroscopy of diverse objects, and physical processes in astrophysical plasmas. She is a leader of the ATOMDB Project, which uses collisional and radiative atomic data to generate spectral models needed for high-energy astrophysics.

 

How do SOC members ensure an appropriate level of diversity among conference invited speakers if the committee chair does not provide leadership? Here are some suggestions.  

 

•When asked to serve on a SOC, make sure you understand the ground rules at the beginning.

 

•Ask what the schedule for decision-making is, and make sure there is enough time to think through issues of balance; put the schedule on your calendar and check with the SOC chair if you haven't heard back by the date promised.

 

•Make sure that you have time to participate fully.

Harassment from Students

The recent discussions on harassment in astronomy have been really thought-provoking and inspiring.  But yet another form of harassment that those of us in academia have to face is harassment from students.  This can take all sorts of forms, but in the end it all comes down to a lack of respect from (usually male) students simply because you're a woman.  The trouble is that the advice you get on how to deal with harassment from peers or superiors is often not useful or appropriate for dealing with harassment from those junior to you.  If it happens during class and is clearly disruptive, you can simply ask the student to leave.  But just as many serial harassers have become more sneaky in how they operate, students can be pretty sneaky, too.

I'd like to pose here a couple of scenarios and ask what you would advise someone to do in these situations.

Case 1: It's the first day of class, and you don't know any of your students yet.  Someone makes a crack that's out of line, and clearly because you are a woman.  It's a big class, and since you don't know names yet, you can't identify him afterwards.  What do you do?

Case 2: Your end-of-term teaching evaluations come in, and you get remarks on your appearance that have nothing to with your teaching.  The evaluations are all anonymous, and your grades are already turned in.  However, not only do you find the comments upsetting, but your evaluations do matter when it comes to review for tenure.  What do you do?

Bonus: Your end-of-term teaching evaluations come in, and there are comments making fun of your non-European name.  Or your regional accent.  What do you do?


While "just ignore them" is a possible response, the attitudes of students does have an affect on the workplace climate, just as much as attitudes of the faculty.  Not only that, but by not correcting the attitudes of the students, some day they might grow up to become the serial harassers of the world.  It would be nice to be able to nip that kind of behavior in the bud, but short of a reeducation camp, what do you do?

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 23, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of May 23, 2014

eds: Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, Nick Murphy, & Nicolle Zellner

This week's issues:

1. Why We Resist Unconscious Bias

2. June AAS Town Hall: Addressing Sexual Violence on College Campuses 

3. When CSMA? Will Women Astronomers Outnumber Men in the Near Future?

4. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a Teaching-Focused Institution

5. Request for Info: Gender Bias in Oral Exams

6. 4th Gender Summit (EU)

7. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

8. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

9. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

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Career Profiles: Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a Teaching-Focused Institution

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Agnes Kim, a a tenure track faculty in physics at a teaching-focused institution. She loves her job and writes, "There is freedom in projects I pursue and variety in my daily activities". If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every first and third Thursday of the month.

Why We Resist Unconscious Bias

By Meg Urry, Yale University, Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy. Reproduced from the January 2014 Issue of STATUS: A Report on Women in Astronomy

About ten years ago, I sat down at my computer to take the Implicit Association Test devised by Mahzarin Banaji, then my colleague at Yale University, now at Harvard University. I had just read a story in The New York Times about how she and her colleagues test reaction times for paired words and images, calibrating the experimental subject (in this case, me) on innocuous images, while we type “yes” or “no” to indicate whether the word belongs with the image. For example, you would type “yes” for a flower paired with the word “beautiful,” and “no” for an iceberg and the word “hot.”

June AAS Town Hall: Addressing Sexual Violence on College Campuses (Tuesday, June 3, 12:45 pm)

Content note: This blog post and links within contain discussions of sexual violence which may be triggering to survivors. 

 

Our college campuses are not safe spaces. Sexual violence is endemic, with estimates of one in four college women experiencing a sexual assault during their time on campus. Disclosures by survivors of sexual violence to universities are often met with a culture of indifference, victim blaming, and even hostility. Survivors of color often experience racism when confronting university administrations, and members of the queer and trans* communities often have to deal with heterosexism and cissexism/transphobia. Male survivors often face skepticism. When disclosures of sexual violence are handled poorly, the results can have a disastrous effect on survivors (see the op/ed Dear Harvard: You Win).

At the June AAS meeting in Boston, the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) is hosting a town hall on “Addressing Sexual Violence on College Campuses” (Tuesday, June 3, 12:45 pm in Staffordshire, Westin Copley Place). This town hall will be led by representatives from the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC) who will discuss how community awareness is instrumental in dismantling campus rape culture at our colleges and universities. They will counter harmful myths about sexual violence and discuss research on repeat perpetration and acquaintance rape.

There are currently fifty-five institutions with open Title IX investigations regarding mishandling sexual violence and harassment complaints. We therefore especially encourage department chairs, faculty, and university administrators to attend this important session. However, this work does not stop here. Many organizations worldwide provide education about how to address sexual violence on our campuses and in our communities. Some trainings may even be offered by your institution. If you are located near Boston, BARCC offers a variety of trainings that can be held at colleges and universities.  They have made available a useful guide for prevention of sexual violence on campus and on how to respond to disclosures of sexual assault. Another local group, The Network/La Red, provides community education and trainings to specifically address LGBTQ* partner abuse. Nationwide organizations such as SCESA and INCITE! are working to end sexual violence against women, gender non-conforming, and trans* people of color.

Please join us at the CSWA town hall on June 3. We have much work ahead of us to make our campuses safer spaces.

When CSMA? Will Women Astronomers Outnumber Men in the Near Future?

You may have heard the "On Point" news article on May 12 on public radio about men vs women college graduation rates.  The basic point was that the percentage of men receiving college degrees in the US is less than 50% and falling.  This made me think about the effect on astronomy.

First, here are the college numbers.  The Census Bureau reported that 685,000 men and 916,000 women graduated from college in 2009, or 43% men and 57% women.  The numbers for men have been flat since 1980, while women are steadily rising.  The radio show was focused on the stagnation in the male graduation rates and what can be done about it. 

I considered a different angle:  will women soon have equal numbers to men in astronomy departments?   That would be a positive development from our CSWA (Committee for the Status of Women in Astronomy) standpoint.  But, let's not jump to conclusions too quickly.  Here is a plot I made of fraction of women PhDs in astronomy vs year, with extrapolation into the future.  The data are from the American Institute of Physics.  Yes, there is a significant steady trend of increasing percentage of women receiving PhDs in astronomy.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 16, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of May 16, 2014

eds: Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, Nick Murphy, & Nicolle Zellner

SPECIAL EDITION: Fed Up with Sexual Harassment 

1. Defining the Problem

2. Survival of the Clueless

3. The Serial Harasser's Playbook

4. Power to Speak Up

5. Fed Up with Sexual Harassment

6. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

7. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

8. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Fed Up with Sexual Harassment: Guest Post By Dara Norman

Reproduced from the January 2014 Issue of STATUS: A Report on Women in Astronomy. Guest post by Dara Norman, Research Associate, National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

I am not too social with my media and I am not much for reading blogs. However, even lacking modern connectivity, I still managed to hear about the “urban whore” episode through the electronic grapevine (a list-server). The outrage of the sender and the sketchiness of the account made me immediately curious. A very brief synopsis is that an African American female scientist who writes a blog for Scientific American under the title “Urban Scientist” was asked to contribute to another science blog. When she inquired about compensation, she was asked, in an email, by the editor if she was “an urban scientist or an urban whore.” Googling “urban whore” turned out to be sufficient to get the story.

My reaction – probably typical – was a cascade of emotions. First, I went through shock: not only that the name-calling happened but, even more, that someone would demonstrate such blatant disrespect in an email! I was also outraged at the editor’s assumption of his own privilege and power. I moved on to recognition that as a Black female scientist, similar power play put-downs have certainly happened to me. Finally I settled into a feeling of helplessness that these things continue to happen at all levels of science and in many scientific fields. In the explosion of commentary since the initial episode, I’ve seen a few discussions based on the assumption that a male scientist would never be insulted for asking about compensation for his work. I also wonder if even a white woman would have been labeled “whore”... but that is an outrage for another day.

Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Power to Speak Up

To continue this week's series on sexual harassment, we have a guest post from Caitlin Casey, a McCue Fellow at UC Irvine who studies dusty galaxies at high-redshift.  Caitlin co-wrote, with Kartik Sheth, a Nature careers column entitled The Ethical Grey Zone, based on a workshop they developed and later implemented online through Astrobetter which focused on ethically ambiguous hypotheticals affecting academics' careers. Previous posts can be found here, here and here.

"Can we stop talking about this feminist
stuff and get back to work?"- Old Me

I haven’t always been an advocate for “women’s issues” in academia.  I have distinct [not-so-distant] memories of rolling my eyes when hearing about ‘diversity workshops’ or scholarship/fellowship opportunities only available to women or men of color or white women.  I thought we were beyond this. I thought the playing field was leveled.  I even thought such `nonsense’ did a disservice to underrepresented groups in science by unnecessarily reminding them of their uphill battle and struggles of the past.  And then I had a major wake up call.

“Wake up call” isn’t really the right term. I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and see that I lived in a world different to the one I knew growing up. “Waking up” took years of thought, questioning, self-doubt, and help from colleagues and friends, but it eventually happened.  I woke up to a world where I had been a reluctant recipient of sexual harassment and hated my job as a result.  It was a job I had once loved and invested so much in.  I was depressed, isolated and ready to quit. I blamed myself and my incompetence for a whole lot of strange, uncomfortable interactions with colleagues. 

Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: The Serial Harasser's Playbook

This is the third in a series of posts this week on the topic of sexual harassment in astronomy. The other posts can be found here (Defining the problem) and here (Survival of the clueless), with more to come later this week. 

With this post, rather than publicly naming the (well-known) serial harassers in astronomy, I'll instead publish their (combined) playbook. I've witnessed some of these individuals practice their "craft," and I've heard even more stories. What's remarkable is how consistent they are in doing what they do. I realize there is some risk in publishing this, because it may cause the offenders to change up their strategy. It'll also no doubt ruffle feathers because sexual harassment is such a powerful and effective tool in maintaining a power imbalance in our field. But I figure that risk is nowhere near as bad as allowing them to negatively impact further lives through their actions. So here I present the Serial Harasser's Playbook, stitched together and averaged over many stories. 

Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Survival of the Clueless

Picture from noworkplaceviolence.com

This is the second in a series of posts on the topic of sexual harassment in astronomy. The first can be found here (Defining the problem), with more to come later this week.

Long-term readers of the Women in Astronomy Blogspot will know that I “Came Out” as a victim of sexual harassment in 2011; you can read my story here. Helping victims navigate the confusing rules, hazardous landscapes, and blame-the-victim strategies has been part of my raison d’etre since joining CSWA. I am amazed at how much sexual harassment still goes on in the astronomy community. Unfortunately, it is not just a thing of the past. Here are a few examples of how sexual harassment manifests itself in the 21st century.

 Some sexual harassers have learned exactly how far they can push a situation before they have to pull back. They walk right up to the line and take a small step over it. The harasser can, for example, touch the victim on the shoulder when saying, “Good Morning,” or say something a bit unprofessional like, “You just look too nice today.” Depending on the reaction of the victim, the harasser can quickly retreat behind the line with profuse apologies for going too far. If, on the other hand, the victim reacts in a friendly manner, the harasser can redraw the line and repeat the tactic (more on this in tomorrow's post).

Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Defining the Problem

One of the most damaging, yet all too common practices that hurts women's careers in astronomy is sexual harassment. Title IX of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as amended in 1972) defines sexual harassment as

[U]nwanted or unwelcome behavior of a sexual nature that interferes unreasonably with a student’s ability to learn, study, work, achieve, or participate in school activities. Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination, and schools are legally responsible for preventing it. Schools must also prevent harassment based on your sex, even if it is not sexual in nature. 

Sexual harassment need not occur on school property—it can happen off school grounds in any school-related program or activity. 

Unlike flirting or good-natured joking, which are mutual interactions between two people, sexual harassment is unwelcomed and unwanted behavior which may cause the target to feel threatened, afraid, humiliated, angry, or trapped.

Note how intent is not included in any aspect of the definition. All that matters is the action and the result.

Before delving into this subject further I think it's very important to point out one important aspect of sexual harassment in comparison to the other factors that impede equal access in astronomy, such as the two-body problem, implicit (unconscious) bias, stereotype threat, lack of family leave policies at our institutions, etc. Of all of these various factors, sexual harassment is specifically prohibited by federal law. If we can't solve an illegal barrier for women in astronomy, how can we tackle the other issues that prevent equal opportunities for employment in our field?

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 9, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 9, 2014
eds. Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, Nick Murphy, & Nicolle Zellner

This week's issues:

1. Ain't I a woman? At the intersection of gender, race and sexuality

2. June AAS Town Hall: Addressing Sexual Violence on College Campuses

3. Gender & Race Differences in NonAcademic Careers for STEM Ph.D.s

4. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Soft Money Researcher

5. New Resource Guide for Women in Astronomy

6. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

7. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

8. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Soft Money Researcher

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with an astronomer turned soft money researcher. S/he is the PI for a major instrument on a 10-m class telescope. S/he is also in a dual astronomy career couple. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.

Gender & Race Differences in NonAcademic Careers for STEM Ph.D.s

Nonacademic career trajectories are an important and often overlooked piece of the conversation about recruitment and retention of women and minorities in STEM. 

A new analysis by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) shows 61% of STEM Ph.D.s have careers outside of academia. This should come as no real surprise. What is of interest here is that there are statistically significant differences by race and gender. For example, Black, Hispanic, and White women with STEM Ph.D.s who went on to nonacademic careers are more likely to leave STEM compared with other groups in nonacademic careers. About 28% of these women work in non-STEM fields, compared with Asian men (16%), Asian women (18%), Hispanic men (18%), black men (21%) and white men (21%).

Furthermore, more than 57% of all male STEM Ph.D.s work in research and development, compared with 43% of all white female STEM Ph.D.s and 37% of black female STEM Ph.D.s. 

Ain't I a woman? At the intersection of gender, race and sexuality

Today's guest post is by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a Martin Luther King, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Department of Physics. She specializes in theoretical cosmology and has an interest in formal issues in field theory and relativity. She also serves as an informal academic advisor for most of the very few underrepresented minority women physics majors at M.I.T.

In 1851, former slave Sojourner Truth asked white feminists, "Ain't I a woman?" when they refused to let her speak at a women's conference because she was Black. One might hope that in 158 years, that speech wouldn't seem so essential and relevant. But at the 2009 Women in Astronomy conference, my first foray into non-race oriented equal opportunity efforts, we were told the news was good: women had made significant gains and equality was on its way. There was no substantive mention of race beyond Peggy McIntosh's talk. But I knew the truth. I have been looking at the NSF and AIP statistics myself for years, and I knew that the news was not good for Black, Latina, and Native American women. Those numbers hadn't changed too significantly in three decades. How could they possibly be telling us that the news was good?

As a queer Black (cis)woman, I live at the intersection of multiple minority statuses. More of my time than I would like has been sucked up in trying to fend off the marginalization that society's structures foist upon anyone who has even one of these identities. More of my time than I would like has been spent thinking about a way out of those structures and trying to convince others to help.

And here's one thing I want out of: the phrase "women and minorities," a phrase I used to use a lot myself. As part of the effort to push for equal opportunities in STEM, I  used it repeatedly for over a decade, thinking that I was advocating not just for strangers but also for myself. At some point however, hearing other people use it began to grate on me. A lot.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 2, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 2, 2014
eds. Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, Nick Murphy, & Nicolle Zellner

This week's issues:

1. Report: Gender in AAS Talks

2. Promoting Diversity - UK's Athena SWAN Program

3. Wyoming Women

4. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Faculty and Entrepreneur

5. Cosmos Episode 8 Preview: Female Astronomers

6. 2014 Gerald A. Soffen Travel Grant for Students

7. Women More likely to Burnout

8. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

10. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Faculty and Entrepreneur

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Douglas Arion, an astronomer turned faculty and entrepreneur. He has worked both in academia and business and has been very satisfied with his work and work-life balance. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.