Women In Astronomy: AASWOMEN Newsletter for January 23, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of January 23, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Astro-Diversity: Post #1 – The Pipeline to Astronomy Degrees
From: Joan Schmelz via http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/

[Dr. Lisa M. Frehill is an IPA at NSF in Strategic Human Capital Planning working as an Organizational Evaluation and Assessment Researcher. Her home institution is Energetics Technology Center in St. Charles, MD, where she has completed science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce analysis and assessment and evaluation in support of the Office of Naval Research, the DoD STEM Development Office and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is an expert on diversity in STEM and on program evaluation.]

This is the first in a series of posts about diversity in astronomy. The idea for the series emerged from conversations with Dr. Joan Schmelz, who is serving as an NSF program officer in the Division of Astronomy on loan from the University of Memphis. Joan has been involved in issues for women in astronomy and is interested in being attentive to how to more generally increase the diversity of her field.

This first post will provide a view of the pipeline into college and bachelor's degree attainment in both astronomy and physics, which is an important "feeder field." Future posts will look at U.S. astronomy degrees in greater detail.

To read more, please see

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2015/01/astro-diversity-post-1-pipeline-to.html

2. President Obama: Childcare is a Must-Have
From: David Charbonneau via http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/

I married into a family of State-of-the-Union watchers, and I have embraced the tradition of watching the address live. Yesterday, we managed to get the kids (mostly) in bed and (mostly) asleep by the 9pm start, and so my wife and I snuggled up to hear what the President had to say.

Over the past decade, these addresses have been peppered with words like "terrorist", "war", "recession", and "unemployment". Then, just about 14 minutes in, I heard a different word: "childcare".

"Wait, what?" said Margaret. "Is this really happening?"

Then, yes, it happened. President Obama told us that childcare is a national economic priority...

To read more, please see

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2015/01/president-obama-childcare-is-must-have.html

3. Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines
From: Daryl Haggard [dhaggard_at_amherst.edu]

by Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian, Meredith Meyer, Edward Freeland

The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women's underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.'s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans' underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.

To read the article in Science, please see

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/262

To read the review in Nature, please see

http://www.nature.com/news/hidden-hurdle-for-women-in-science-1.16727

4. Women in Science Symposium 2015
From: APS Women in Physics Group

2015 is the International Year of Light. To celebrate this, the Young Academy of Europe will be hosting a symposium co-organized by SciLifeLab and co-sponsored by the Academia Europaea and Uppsala University to celebrate the accomplishments of illuminating women in science.

To learn more, please see

http://yacadeuro.org/workshops/womeninscience2015.htm

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Women In Astronomy

Friday, January 23, 2015

AASWOMEN Newsletter for January 23, 2015

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