AAS Committee on the Status of Women
November 9, 2018
eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, and JoEllen McBride
This week's issues:
1. Rubrics and Resources for a Diverse Faculty and Graduate Student Body
2. Unforgotten sisters: The woman who bested Kepler
3. This women-led space program is crowdfunding Kyrgyzstan’s first satellite launch
4. STEM: What’s holding females back?
5. 10 Career Tips From The First Woman To Lead The Smithsonian Air And Space Museum
6. Women in tech call on global summit for greater roles as #MeToo hits
7. To address sexual harassment in science, the past can inform the way forward
8. Job Opportunities
9. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
11. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter
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1. Rubrics and Resources for a Diverse Faculty and Graduate Student Body
From: Nicolle Zellner via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
The editors of the AASWomen Newsletter are receiving many ads for tenure-track faculty positions and fellowship opportunities. Thank you for sending them!
As we enter the "hiring season", please think about using rubrics in decisions related to hiring and, in the case of graduate school, admission. Please also consider making them transparent by publishing them so that applicants are aware of the evaluation criteria. All of us are born with biases and they play out in our lives every day, especially when considering who to add to our department, field, and/or community. Rubrics allow us to compartmentalize those factors that are most important to us and allow a standardization of the factors to be considered, among all members of the decision committee.
Read more and find a list of resources at
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2. Unforgotten sisters: The woman who bested Kepler
From: John Wenzel [jwenzel_at_albion.edu]
Seventeenth century astronomer Maria Cunitz corrected several errors made by Kepler when he calculated planetary positions - and her final report was written in both Latin and German. Today Cunitz is credited with "contributing to the development of modern scientific German language."
Read more at
[Over 400 women scientists are described in Sethanne Howard's book "The Hidden Giant". The web site for children is http://4kyws.ua.edu". --eds.]
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3. This women-led space program is crowdfunding Kyrgyzstan’s first satellite launch
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]
“In the next two years, Kyrgyzstan could have its first space program, completely powered by a team of a dozen women aged from 17 to 25 years old. … The young women behind Kyrgyz Space Program are challenging gender norms by learning engineering and coding to build the country’s first cube satellite …”
Read more at
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4. STEM: What’s holding females back?
From: Alessandra Aloisi [aloisi_at_stsci.edu]
Sue Thomson, Deputy CEO (Research) at the Australian Council for Educational Research comments that “We rightly celebrate great achievements for women in science, such as the Nobel Prizes awarded in Physics to Donna Strickland and in Chemistry to Frances Arnold this year, but why are these achievements such a rarity? Perhaps it’s because women are still vastly underrepresented in many of the sciences at tertiary level.”
Read more at
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5. 10 Career Tips From The First Woman To Lead The Smithsonian Air And Space Museum
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Joan Michaelson
When Ellen Stofan made a deliberate decision to step back from her management-level career in aerospace to spend more time with her kids, she knew she may have derailed her career forever. She was okay with that.
Today, Dr. Stofan leads the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM), one of the most prestigious jobs in the world, as well as in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and the first woman in history to hold that position (her official title is the John and Adrienne Mars Director).
Prior to assuming this role, Stofan served as Chief Scientist at NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She was offered that job after staying home with her young kids and working only part-time for 12 years (sometimes working as little as 10 hours per week).
Read more and learn Dr. Stofan’s career insights and lessons at
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6. Women in tech call on global summit for greater roles as #MeToo hits
From: Alessandra Aloisi [aloisi_at_stsci.edu]
One of technology’s largest global conferences, the Web Summit, saw women leaders calling “for more to be done to drive equality the male-dominated industry… A poll of 1,000 women in tech by the Web Summit, given exclusively to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, showed nearly half, or 47 percent, said the gender ratio in leadership had not improved in the past year. Only 17 percent said it was better.”
Read more at
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7. To address sexual harassment in science, the past can inform the way forward
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Beryl Lieff Benderly
In late September, two major scientific bodies announced new policies aimed at curbing sexual harassment in academic research. The National Science Foundation (NSF) now requires institutions holding grants to report promptly whenever an agency-funded researcher accused of harassment undergoes administrative action or is judged guilty. The agency promises to take corrective action, up to and including removing the offender from a project or even ending the funding. AAAS (the publisher of Science Careers), meanwhile, has established a procedure for rescinding the status of fellows in cases of proven harassment or other serious ethical lapses.
Read more at
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8. Job Opportunities
- PhD studentship, Observational Astronomy (galaxies: chemical enrichment), University of Bath, UK
- PhD studentship, Theoretical Astrophysics (neutron stars), University of Bath, UK
- Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship in Instrumentation and Technology Development, University of Arizona
- Bok Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Arizona
- KASI/Arizona Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Arizona
- Instructor, Physics, Madison Area Technical College
- Assistant Professor, Planetary/Exoplanets, New Mexico State University
For those interested in increasing excellence and diversity in their organizations, a list of resources and advice is here: https://cswa.aas.org/#howtoincrease
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9. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
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11. Access to Past Issues
Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.
