Women In Astronomy: AASWomen Newsletter for June 17, 2016

AAS Committee on the Status of Women AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of June 17, 2016
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Elysse Voyer, & Heather Flewelling

This week's issues:

1. Wake the F-ck Up
From: Jessica Mink via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

Wake the F*ck Up by Debra L. Winegarten, June 13, 2016 No copyright, share

Enough! Death of young innocent queer people Killed because of love Because of dancing Because of being different.

2. Sexual Harassment: Reports of Serial Groping
From: Joan Schmelz via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

Today's guest bloggers are Anonymous A and Anonymous B. A and B are both astronomy postdocs, who realize that they had something quite disturbing in common. They had both been groped by the same senior male astronomer in a public place with multiple witnesses. No one came to their aid.

Our accounts may sound depressingly familiar to many. The recent, highly publicized sexual harassment cases have initiated some frank discussions about the pervasiveness of this problem in our community — something that far too many women already knew firsthand. We’re adding our voices to this conversation partly to share our individual stories, breaking the silence in solidarity with others who have come forward. But because we happen to have been harassed by the same person, our accounts also illustrate how harassment in our community is ultimately not a problem of individual incidents.

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2016/06/sexual-harassment-reports-of-serial.html

3. Coding (and Coloring) the Universe
From: Meg Urry [meg.urry_at_yale.edu]

by Kimberly K. Arcand

When people ask me what I do for work, I often say that I’m a storyteller. It’s not that I stand on a stage with a microphone and narrate long tales to a rapt audience.

My stories are told differently, not through voice or music, but through lines of code and technical applications. They are stories, of science.

As an undergraduate, I began my career in molecular biology, looking at the tiny organisms that can transmit Lyme disease to humans aboard the Ixodes Scapularis (a.k.a., the Deer tick). But by the time I graduated, I was moving on to learn about another type of science: that of computers.

4. Your Body is a Space That Sees: Artist Lia Halloran’s Stunning Cyanotype Tribute to Women in Astronomy
From: Meg Urry [meg.urry_at_yale.edu] and Jayanne English [jayanne.english_at_umanitoba.ca]

by Maria Popova

“We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us,” astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she paved the way for women in science. We are sensorial creatures, of course, and however little of the infinite we may seize, we do so through our powers of bodily perception. Squinting into her two-inch telescope to differentiate the colors of the stars, Mitchell marveled in her diary: “There is something of the same pleasure in noticing the hues that there is in looking at a collection of precious stones, or at a flower-garden in autumn. Blue stars I do not yet see, and but little lilac except through the telescope.”

Around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, that dreamsome blue — the color of distance and desire — was tinting the world of another remarkable woman working in another branch of science. In 1843, English botanist Anna Atkins became the first female photographer and a pioneer of scientific illustration with her revolutionary cyanotypes of sea algae.

A century and a half later, LA-based artist Lia Halloran serenades the spirit of science-inspired art through this early imaging technique in a poetic project titled Your Body is a Space That Sees — a cyanotype celebration of women in astronomy, whose discoveries and contributions to understanding the universe date back to antiquity yet remain largely obscure.

5. Don't give in to impostor syndrome, astrophysics pioneer tells grads
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discover of pulsars, urges class of 2016 to do their best to fight the self-doubt that can rob the world of their talent.

“Well, I’m a bit of a fighter. I knew they’d made a mistake admitting me. I knew they were going to throw me out sooner or later. But I decided in the interim I would work my very hardest, so that when they threw me out, I wouldn’t have a guilty conscience. I'd know I’d done my best. And so I was being very diligent, very thorough, very conscientious, following up every anomaly that our new radio telescope turned up. And that’s what led to the discovery of pulsars.” —Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

6. How Sexism Held Back Space Exploration
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]

by Nathalia Holt

America’s early aerospace engineers ignored computers because they considered programming to be women's work.

They were considered outsiders, both skilled in performing mathematical equations quickly, yet neither of them received a warm reception when they arrived at the laboratory. One was human and one a machine. But both Janez Lawson and the IBM she programmed were known as computers.

In 1952, Lawson had just completed her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. The president of her sorority and a straight-A student from a prestigious university, everyone expected greatness from the 21-year-old African American woman. Yet as Lawson perused the job board on campus, there wasn’t a single engineering position open to someone of her race and sex, no matter her qualifications. When she applied to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, she saw the job of a “computer”—that is, a person responsible for the lab’s calculations—as a way to work in the field, even if she couldn’t have the coveted title of engineer.

7. Getting the Diversity Balance Right in Physics
From: Rick Fienberg [rick.fienberg_at_aas.org]

VII EPS Forum Physics and Society

"Getting the Diversity Balance Right in Physics"

26-28 October 2016 - Institute of Physics, London, United Kingdom

The VII Forum will focus on the perennial problem that is faced by many member countries, namely the lack of girls studying physics beyond age 18 and the lack of women working, particularly at the higher levels, in physics related careers.

Read more at

http://www.forumphysicsandsociety.org

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Women In Astronomy

Friday, June 17, 2016

AASWomen Newsletter for June 17, 2016

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