AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 29, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 29, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Leadership, Role Models . . . and Captain Kathryn Janeway(?)
2. Homework for Those Seeking to be Allies
3. Science still seen as male profession, according to international study of gender bias
4. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
5. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
6. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leadership, Role Models . . . and Captain Kathryn Janeway(?)

The January 2015 issue of CSWA's STATUS Magazine includes an article entitled, “Senior Women Moving into Leadership Positions: Has ADVANCE Affected Junior and Senior Women Scientists Differently?” by Sue V. Rosser, the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University. Part of the article describes responses to a survey question, “In your opinion, what changes in institutional policies and practices are most useful for facilitating careers of academic women scientists or engineers at the senior level?” The only response that got much traction was, “Training for leadership.”

 

I agree that training is an important, perhaps most important, component for leadership. I can think of another one, however, that doesn’t appear to have made the list: Role Models. This is one component of astronomical life that I, unfortunately, was not able to benefit from during the early stages of my career. When I was an undergrad at an engineering school, I knew other undergrad women but no women grad students, postdocs, or professors. When I was a grad student at a state university, I knew other women grad students but no women post docs or professors. When I was a postdoc, I finally started to become aware of senior women in astronomy, but they were not part of my research group and I was not able to interact with them on a personal or professional level.

Homework for Those Seeking to be Allies

The below by Dr. Sarah Ballard is cross-posted (with permission) from John Johnson's blog, Mahalo.ne.Trash.  Dr. Ballard is a Carl Sagan postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, and soon-to-be Torres Fellow at MIT.

The writer and activist Janet Mock describes the idea of an “ally” as more of an action, and less of an identity. “Ally” is something that we actively do, not something that we can ever passively be. I found this conception very helpful to hear because it posits “ally” within the context of hard work. Being an ally is hard work. It is similar to my other kinds of work (in astronomy and elsewhere) in that (1) improvement is not only facilitated by criticism from respected peers and colleagues, it relies upon this criticism, and (2) it’s characterized less by large leaps and bounds, and much more by constant and small day-to-day efforts.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 22, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 22, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Letter of Recommendation for Letters of Recommendation

2. #GirlsWithToys

3. The Broader Impact of Broader Impacts

4. In Science, It Matters That Women Come Last

5. Being "out" as a #scimom

6. Gazing at the Future: The experiences of male and female astronomy doctoral students in the UK

7. Job Opportunities

8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

10. Access to Past Issues

Letter of Recommendation for Letters of Recommendation

My wife pointed out to me an interesting article in the May 2015 issue of Science about gender bias when writing letters of recommendation.  It is by Science Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt and describes her personal experience in reviewing graduate student proposals for small research grants.  She found systematic differences in letters of recommendation for female and male proposers that were detrimental to the females.

Here are some specifics.  Ten percent of the 60 proposers had one or more letter with inappropriate content for the purpose of the letter and all such cases were in letters for the women.  Prof. McNutt cites examples of mentioning that the candidate was "so good to her elderly mother", "spending time in nature with her husband and her animals friends".  Another discussed the candidate's balancing being a scientists and a mother.  Also, the language was on-average different between men and women in a detrimental way for women.  In some cases, the women got adjectives such as "friendly", "kind", "pleasant", "humble", and frequently "nice".  Typical language for the male candidates, and also many of the females candidates, included "brilliant", "creative", "hard-working", insightful" and "showing leadership".

 

Graphic from Science May 2015 issue (McNutt)

#GirlsWithToys

"Many scientists, I think, secretly are what I call 'boys with toys.' I really like playing around with telescopes. It's just not fashionable to admit it." These are the words of Caltech Professor and Optical Observatories Director Shri Kulkarni, shared with NPR's Joe Palca on Weekend Edition Saturday May 16, 2015.

The photograph of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin on the left shows that women have also been fascinated by scientific instrumentation since before Kulkarni was born. They just haven't always had access to it, unlike the boys.

Kulkarni himself has supervised several female graduate students and postdocs, so his choice of words was surprising. They do seem like a prime example of unconscious bias. Are there still scientists, or others, who believe that they are completely objective and fair? If so, please share with them the Implicit Association Test, so that they can match their wits against a computer. For a little background, see this nice explanation within the SPLC Teaching Tolerance curriculum.

Words matter. When a leading scientist excludes girls, it sends the message, whether intended or not, that girls should not apply because they do not belong. The same  message is regularly heard by people of color, transgender people, and others. We expect better of our community members.

Fortunately, social media enables us to advance a different narrative, one that shows women (and, one hopes, people of color and other genders) playing with their scientific toys. I don't know how Twitter views compare with the audience size of Weekend Edition, but I know that it can have an impact. If more young people are drawn into STEM fields through the inspiration of  role models showing up under the #GirlsWithToys hashtag, Kulkarni's comment will have served a useful purpose.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 15, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 15, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Statement affirming respectful debate during current TMT protests

2. Diversity 101: Nine Simple Steps to a More Diverse Astronomical Community

3. The Family Friendly Faculty Retreat

4. Survey for LGBT+ Physicists and Physics Students

5. Job Opportunities

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

Statement affirming respectful debate during current TMT protests

This was submitted to the WiA blog by leaders on diversity issues from within the AAS community. There has also been a statement from AAS President Meg Urry.

The last few weeks have brought to a head a confrontation between Native Hawaiian protesters and the Thirty Meter Telescope project. There are varied perspectives on all sides of this issue, amongst supporters and opponents, Hawaiians and mainlanders, astronomers and the general public, and all intersections of these groups. Events associated with the protests, including some cases of violence or threats of violence, have created significant divisions within our community, divisions which have manifested themselves in heated debates and discussions both in person and over social media.

Unfortunately, recent rhetoric in our community has crossed the line into racism and hostility, with language (e.g., describing Native Hawaiian protestors as a “horde” or other people of color as “snakes”) that dehumanizes individuals who oppose the placement of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna a Wakea. This language is a painful reminder of past acts of violence perpetrated against native people and others, and only serves to inflame rather than bring about understanding and resolution. In many cases, apologies have been issued, and these have been appreciated. Still, that this language was used in the first place by highly esteemed members of our community is troubling, because the effects linger, are particularly harmful to junior researchers and students, and create an environment of hostility and exclusion.

The Family Friendly Faculty Retreat

Future faculty scheming how they will run their retreats.

Does your department or research group undertake an annual retreat? If so, is it family friendly?

Retreats offer the chance to break from the routines and confines of day-to-day work to gather as a group to consider the Big Questions facing an institution. In my view, an essential part of an effective retreat is that it be away from the office, and that it span at least one overnight.

I know of several physical science departments for which the "retreat" consists of a full-day meeting at their workplace. But I worry that in the temporal and physical space that houses our day-to-day work, it is all-too-easy to fall back on day-to-day thinking. The goals of the retreat is much more grand: First, we seek to build community. Second, we seek to engage in blue-sky thinking and fresh approaches aimed at tackling the Big Questions! An overnight also means meals together, and it is over meals that I have experienced the most thought provoking conversations, and the opportunity to really check-in with colleagues.

However, (overnight) + (away from office) puts a retreat on a collision course with that sacred family-work balance that we seek. I have written previously about the excellent evidence that concerns about family-work balance adversely affect the retention of women in the sciences. So, isn't the idea of a retreat inherently problematic? Perhaps not, if the families are invited!

Diversity 101: Nine Simple Steps to a More Diverse Astronomical Community

 

 

Today’s bloggers are Joan Schmelz (me!), Program Officer at NSF, Physics Professor at the University of Memphis, Chair of CSWA, and soon-to-be Deputy Director of Arecibo Observatory; Dara Norman, Research Astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Visiting Faculty Fellow at Howard University, AAS Council Member, and Alum of CSMA; and Van Dixon, Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Chair of WGLE.

 

Mentoring Women: advice from Joan Schmelz

 

Those of us that work to make the astronomy community a more diverse place can learn from the old playbook of the senior white men who mentored a generation of junior white women, say 20 years ago. Many of these men had the best of intentions; many even hoped to make the world of astronomy a better place for their own daughters to grow up in. Some used the model of the father-daughter relationship to form the basis of the interactions they would have with their female students. Sometimes it worked – support, direction, and respect are all good components that can transfer from one dynamic to the other. Sometimes it didn’t work – hugging, love, and discipline are all components that are tricky to apply to the professional environment.

 

For those of us who do have the best of intentions, how do we navigate the diverse mentoring challenges of modern day astronomy? What can we learn from the last generation who helped white women break into the field and achieve success in numbers that now approach parity? I ask myself what advice I would have given to a well-intentioned senior white man about mentoring young women in astronomy (if one had bothered to ask, that is) back when I was a junior astronomer? Here are three simple things that any potential mentor could have done:

 

1. First, do no harm.

 

Don’t tell sexist jokes. You should never make insulting or condescending remarks about women as a group. Hint: if you think it could be insulting or condescending, it probably is. If you are a professor, be careful what you say in front of your class or to your advisees. Address both your colleagues and your students with respect. Don’t propagate old-fashioned ideas like women are too emotional or not logical enough to do science. You should never entangle your professional life with your personal life by asking your students out for coffee, beer, or dinner. Don’t touch your students on the arm or shoulder. Never hug or kiss your students. This may seem obvious and, indeed, it should be. But think of how different it might have been if everyone in the astronomy community had behaved in a professional manner. Sexual harassment and sexual discrimination would never have exploded into such damaging issues!

 

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 8, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 15, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Statement affirming respectful debate during current TMT protests

2. Diversity 101: Nine Simple Steps to a More Diverse Astronomical Community

3. The Family Friendly Faculty Retreat

4. Survey for LGBT+ Physicists and Physics Students

5. Job Opportunities

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

Hockey or STEM?

The below is a guest post written by Dr. Jo-Anne Brown. Dr. Brown is a radio astronomer and faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, cross-appointed to Natural Sciences, at the University of Calgary. 

Earlier this week I posted a Maclean's article on my FB page about the statistics of women in STEM, particularly in Canada. The article described the exodus of women out of careers in science as “death by a thousand cuts”, and identified a number of areas, including major award recipients, where women were vastly under-represented. One comment I received from a friend (and former student) was, “If 19% of first year [engineering] students are female, and 12% [of professional engineers] are female, that's of course a problem (both the low initial enrolment and the attrition). But if 18% of the [Canadian Science and Engineering] Hall of Famers and 28% of the Canada Research Chairs are women, wouldn't this indicate over-representation based on the percentage of women in STEM? ... How do we reconcile these numbers?”

Gender Representation at a Specialized Astronomy Conference

Today's guest blogger is Kyle Willett. Kyle is a postdoc in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. He works on galaxy morphology and their relation to active black holes, particularly as part of the Galaxy Zoo project.

Members of the astronomy community have recently been tracking participation at conferences as a function of gender. This is intended to address some basic questions about behavior at conferences, such as:

• How equal are the allotments of talks among men and women?
• Are men and women asking questions of speakers at the same rate?
• Does it matter if the speaker/session chair is a man or a woman?
• Are women/men more likely to ask the first question in a session? Does this affect the gender balance of remaining questions?

In the broader sense, this is intended to measure if our collective behavior at conferences — in choosing speakers, engaging with them, and interacting with the audience — is as inclusive as it should be. If not, then hopefully the community can come up with some ideas of best practices to follow.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 01, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 01, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. The Limits of Labels, Categories, and Classifications

2. Uncomfortable conversations and my responsibility within our community

3. I was wrong and I am sorry

4. 2015 Susan Niebur LPSC Networking Event Summary

5. Attitudes of post-docs towards mid-career female scientists

6. How I Became a NASA Engineer Despite My Disability

7. Congress Probes Possible Bias against Women in U.S. Science Funding

8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

10. Access to Past Issues