Women In Astronomy: AASWOMEN Newsletter for December 19, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of December 19, 2014
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Cogitations on Gender at the "dot Astro" Conference

From: Brooke Simmons via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

Last week I was at the .Astronomy meeting at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. .Astro ("dot astro") is less a meeting about any specific science and more a meeting about being a scientist, and using the internet to do and communicate science. It's also more than that, and partly its structure is what makes it hard to define: about half of it is an unconference whose agenda is set on the fly by the participants. This choose-your-own-adventure meeting means that each .Astro is different, but it also means that a single .Astro is different for each person there.

3. Results from a survey of gender and question asking among UK astronomers

From: Karen Masters [karen.masters_at_port.ac.uk]

I'd like to point the readers of this list to a study of the gender of astronomers asking questions at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in June 2014. This work was a followup of the similar study done by Davenport et al. at the Jan 2014 AAS Meeting, using much the same methodology. Much of the analysis was done at the first ever NAM Hack Day (sponsored by .dotAstronomy and Github). It was interesting to see the points of similarities and subtle differences between the UK and US astronomical communities in these results. We would welcome your comments on the results and our suggested actions.

Asking gender questions: Results from a survey of gender and question asking among UK Astronomers at NAM2014

The paper can be read in full in the Astronomy&Geophysics Magazine:

http://astrogeo.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/6/6.8.full

Or on arxiv at:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.4571

4. Thinking about how girls think about themselves

From: Rick Fienberg [rick.fienberg_at_aas.org]

By Athene Donald

Self-perception colours our choices, limits or drives our ambitions, and affects how we come across to others. So role models and cultural icons matter when it comes to the messages we give our children. If we tell boys not to cry, they can grow up feeling they are wimps if they let their emotions overspill. If we give girls the message that their primary role is to nurture talent in others not themselves, there is the likelihood they will not aspire to be leaders. And, if we praise the actions of WAGS for having snagged a Premier League player, girls may assume that they only exist in relation to others.

This is equally true if we give young girls role models in the form of impossibly proportioned Barbie dolls dressed to kill instead of more realistic toys with ‘ambitions’ to make something of themselves. This is the logic behind the crowd-sourced doll Lammily (not the most resonant of names) that has recently hit the market. With vital statistics corresponding to those of an average 19-year-old, i.e. 32-31-33, and with accessories including stick-on acne, freckles and scars, the idea is that children will see this doll as ‘just like them’ (or at least their big sister) and so their imagination will be sparked in different ways from that which Barbie encourages.

On a very limited study, with no statistical significance, it would appear to be working.

5. Recognizing and Inspiring Women Scientists

From: Daryl Haggard [dhaggard_at_amherst.edu]

From an email by Megan Smith, U.S. Chief Technology Officer:

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street. During a tour of the residence, we were shown a painting of an elegantly dressed woman. "Of course, you know Lady Lovelace," we were told.

Imagine our surprise to learn that we were staring at a portrait of the woman who is considered to be the world's first programmer. Our group had never heard of her.

Ada Lovelace's experience remains all too familiar: So many of the breakthrough contributions of women in science, technology, engineering, and math is considered to be the world's first programmer. Our group had never heard of her.

Ada Lovelace's experience remains all too familiar: So many of the breakthrough contributions of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields continue to go untold, too often fading into obscurity.

Join us in doing something to change that: Listen to women from across the Obama administration share the untold stories of women who've inspired us.

Then add an untold history of your own, and make a commitment to share these stories in any way you can to help inspire more young women and men to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/women-in-stem

6. Mass Moments: Henrietta Leavitt Buried in Cambridge

From: Daryl Haggard [dhaggard_at_amherst.edu]

By "Mass Moments" http://www.massmoments.org

On this day in 1921, Henrietta Leavitt, a scientist at the Harvard Observatory, was buried in Cambridge. Her premature death cut short a brilliant career as an astronomer. In the late nineteenth century, observatory director Edward Pickering wanted to map the brightness and color of the visible stars. He proposed a painstaking process of manually counting and computing the images revealed in thousands of photographs of starfields. Pickering knew he would need bright, meticulous, and dedicated people willing to work for low pay. So he hired women. These recent college graduates threw themselves into the work with enthusiasm. They discovered new stars and developed laws that provided a "cosmic yardstick" for measuring the universe, proving that women could be astronomers and scientists.

2 comments:

AnonymousJanuary 1, 2015 at 8:39 PM
To the Editors from Jay Pasachoff:

I am always glad to read about Henrietta Leavitt, and to help push Leavitt's Law as a name for the period-luminosity relation, in analogy to using Hubble's law as the name for the redshift-distance relation. But I was disappointed to see the article posted, in massmoments.com (http://www.massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=358) making the same mistaken that I had just graded as wrong for several of my Astronomy 101 class's final exams: the post credits her with finding a "critical relationship between a variable star's brightness," while the relation is only valid for the very small (but important) subclass of variable stars known as "Cepheid variable stars." The post should have read "between Cepheid variable stars' brightnesses...."

To emphasize the distinction, in my class and in my textbook (The Cosmos, Astronomy in the New Millennium), I have started showing light curves of 10 variable stars, only two of which are Cepheids.

Jay Pasachoff
Williams College
eclipse@williams.edu
AnonymousJanuary 1, 2015 at 8:46 PM
To the Editors from Sethanne Howard:

I remind us that women have been active in STEM for over 4,000 years

http://www.astronomy.ua.edu/4000WS

People keep forgetting that we have been part of the process from the beginning. Our numbers were usually not as high as the mens (except perhaps in the Dark Ages where the numbers were more equal, interestingly enough). But even so we persisted, and accomplished great things. Some struggled against prejudice. Some were lucky. Having a family was usually not a hindrance.

There is a book called "The Hidden Giants" where I give brief comments about 400 women from our past 4,000 years. It is available on Amazon. In the latest edition of the Hidden Giants I have a chapter on how the status of women has evolved through the millennia.

Sethanne Howard

Friday, December 19, 2014

AASWOMEN Newsletter for December 19, 2014

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