Issue of September 27, 2019
eds: JoEllen McBride, Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, and Alessandra Aloisi
This week's issues:
1. Crosspost: How The First Woman in Climate Science Beat One of Its Founders to a Major Finding
2. New Data on Bachelor's Degrees Earned by African Americans
3. Astronomy Degree Recipients: One Year After Degree
4. Latest Employment Data on New Physics & Astronomy PhDs
5. Lindsay Yazzolino Helps Visually Impaired People Engage With Science
6. What It’s Like to Be a Woman in the Academy
7. Leadership and Participation in NASA's Explorer-Class Missions
8. How can we STEM the tide of women graduates leaving science?
9. Beautiful (and free) posters celebrating women in science
10. Women miss out on high-profile awards and positions
11. Jeffrey Epstein Infiltrated Science Because It Was Ready To Accommodate Him
12. Why MIT’s Epstein Problem Is ‘Clearly a Women’s Issue’
13. 'Get Used to it' — The Women Who Broke Through Apollo's Glass Ceiling
14. How Do You Tell Colombian Kids A Science Yarn? With Crochet!
16. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
17. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
18. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter
1. Crosspost: How The First Woman in Climate Science Beat One of Its Founders to a Major Finding
From: JoEllen McBride via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
By Carly Cassela via ScienceAlert
This September, as the world takes a stand on climate change like never before, let's spare a thought for those who helped set the stage. The history of climate science stretches back nearly two hundred years, and in all that time, few women have been memorialised in the discipline.
Just ten years ago, Eunice Foote was a name and face all but forgotten, but in 2019, on her 200th birthday, a handful of scientists are determined to keep her memory alive.
Read more at
235th AAS Meeting Carbon Offsets Learn more about how you can contribute up to $100 towards the purchase of carbon offsets to offset your travel to the 235th AAS Meeting in Hawaii in January here
https://aas.org/meetings/aas235/events#contributions
Simply select 'Contribute up to $100 to the purchase of carbon offsets' when you register for additional events.
Back to top.2. New Data on Bachelor's Degrees Earned by African Americans
From: AAS News Digest [news_at_aas.org]
By Richard Fienberg
“This post is adapted from an American Institute of Physics press release:
African Americans are seeing growth in many engineering and physical sciences fields, but they are not progressing at the same rate when compared to the general population.
A report from the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistical Research Center (SRC) examined the number of bachelor's degrees earned from 2005 to 2015 and separated out the numbers for African Americans from the rest of the students. The data was gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics from postsecondary institutions in the United States.”
Read more at
https://aas.org/posts/news/2019/09/new-data-bachelors-degrees-earned-african-americans
Read the full report at
Back to top.3. Astronomy Degree Recipients: One Year After Degree
From: AAS News Digest [news_at_aas.org]
By Richard Fienberg
“This post is adapted from an American Institute of Physics announcement:
A new report by Patrick Mulvey and Jack Pold of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistical Research Center (SRC) details the initial employment outcomes of astronomy bachelor's degree, master's degree, and PhD recipients from the classes of 2014, 2015, and 2016 combined. It includes data on starting salaries, employment sectors, and fields of employment. The report also includes data on the proportion of astronomy bachelor's and master's recipients who continued their education after receiving their degrees. The data come from the annual AIP follow-up survey conducted in the winter following the academic year in which the students received their degrees.”
Read the press release at
https://aas.org/posts/news/2019/09/astronomy-degree-recipients-one-year-after-degree
Read the full report at
https://www.aip.org/statistics/reports/astronomy-degree-recipients-one-year-after-degree
Back to top.4. Latest Employment Data on New Physics & Astronomy PhDs
From: AAS News Digest [news_at_aas.org]
By Richard Fienberg
“Where do you find the latest data on education, careers, and diversity in physics, astronomy, and related physical sciences? At the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistical Research Center (SRC)! The AAS is one of AIP's member societies, and if you don't regularly browse the SRC's survey data and other reports, you're missing out on a lot of valuable information.
Patrick Mulvey and Jack Pold of the SRC have recently released two reports based on the annual AIP Follow-up Survey of physics and astronomy PhD recipients, classes of 2015 and 2016.”
Read more at
https://aas.org/posts/news/2019/09/latest-employment-data-new-physics-astronomy-phds
Read the full reports at
https://www.aip.org/statistics/reports/physics-doctorates-initial-employment-2015
and
https://www.aip.org/statistics/reports/physics-doctorates-one-year-after-degree-0
Back to top.
Lindsay gives a presentation at the Pacific Division Annual Meeting, holding a 3D smilodon fossil head. Photo by Joan Horvath.From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]
by Delia O'Hara
“Lindsay Yazzolino, a cognitive scientist who has been blind from birth, is on a mission to support diversity and inclusion in STEM. ... "When people talk about blindness, they use words like 'suffering' and 'overcoming.' They don't always realize that blind people can have rich sensory experiences," she says. "People make all kinds of assumptions that are wrong."”
Read more at
Back to top.6. What It’s Like to Be a Woman in the Academy
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]
"When it comes to silencing women," writes Mary Beard, "Western culture has had thousands of years of practice." Academe is no exception. A recent conference at Stanford University featured 30 speakers — all of them men, all of them white. The incident sparked ridicule and outrage, as well as a sense that higher education is facing a reckoning. Over the past few months, amid mounting revelations of sexual harassment, The Chronicle Review asked presidents and adjuncts, scientists and humanists, senior scholars and junior professors to take on the theme of women and power in academe. Here are their responses.
Read more at
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/the-awakening
Back to top.7. Leadership and Participation in NASA's Explorer-Class Missions
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]
A study by NASA leadership has found that among the 102 Principal Investigators of Explorer-class mission, just three were female. "The percentage of females in science teams in these proposals ranges from a low of 10% to a high of 19% across the various solicitations. Combining data from all these Explorer-class proposals, we find that the overall participation by females in science teams is 14%. Eighteen of the Explorer-class proposals had zero females in science roles ... These results demonstrate that participation by women in the leadership of and, in many cases, on the science teams of proposals for Explorer-class missions is well below the representation of women in astronomy and astrophysics as a whole."
Read more at
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=52870
Read the report at
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.10314
Back to top.8. How can we STEM the tide of women graduates leaving science?
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Shamika Sirimanne
“Gender bias can be illustrated using a simple Google exercise. Type into Google Translate: “She is a scientist. He is a nurse.”
Translate it into a language that does not have gender pronouns, such as Georgian or Turkish.
When it comes back in English, the result shown after automatic translation is: “He is a scientist. She is a nurse”.
Just as the devil is in the detail, the bias is in the algorithm.”
Read more at
Back to top.9. Beautiful (and free) posters celebrating women in science
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Mihai Andrei
“To say that women are underrepresented in science is a heavy understatement. While there are certainly striking counterexamples, women in science have a tough time. Low visibility is also an important issue. “If she can’t see it, she can’t be it,” they say — if we want to get more girls and women into STEM, it’s important to show highlight role models. This is exactly what these downloadable posters are for.”
See the posters at
https://www.zmescience.com/science/free-posters-women-science-24092019
Back to top.10. Women miss out on high-profile awards and positions
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Michael Allen
“Women are under-represented in senior positions within scientific societies and are disproportionally overlooked for high-profile society awards. That is according to an analysis of the leadership roles at 31 scientific societies in four countries – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK. Despite the gender imbalance at higher positions, the researchers found, however, that women are well represented in lower-status roles as well as with early-career society awards (Royal Society Open Science 10.1098/rsos.190633).”
Read more at
https://physicsworld.com/a/women-miss-out-on-high-profile-awards-and-positions
Back to top.11. Jeffrey Epstein Infiltrated Science Because It Was Ready To Accommodate Him
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Elizabeth Lopatto
“Money and power are clarifying agents: they tell you who people are. Jeffrey Epstein liked to describe himself as a “science philanthropist,” and academics liked to take his money. Among them was Joichi Ito, who stepped down on September 7th as the head of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab, where a host of tech products were developed, including the E Ink used in Amazon’s Kindle and Guitar Hero.
Ito isn’t alone, and he won’t be the last person to take money from questionable benefactors. As more of Epstein’s enablers are uncovered, it’s worth asking why it was so easy for him to infiltrate science in the first place.”
Read more at
Back to top.12. Why MIT’s Epstein Problem Is ‘Clearly a Women’s Issue’
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Nell Gluckman
“Nancy Hopkins, an emeritus biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traveled to Cambridge, Mass., this week in order to attend a faculty meeting.
It wasn’t just any meeting of faculty members. This was their first meeting with the university’s president, L. Rafael Reif, since the news broke not only that MIT had accepted money from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein but also that, as The New Yorker reported, the MIT Media Lab’s director, Joichi Ito, had sought to hide a longstanding relationship with the disgraced financier.”
Read more at
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-MIT-s-Epstein-Problem-Is/247200
Back to top.13. 'Get Used to it' — The Women Who Broke Through Apollo's Glass Ceiling
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Chelsea Gohd
“Touching on the subject of harassment, Morgan also told the story of how a supervisor once "whacked" her on the back and told her that women were not allowed to be in the room that she had been instructed to work in. She later encountered that same man while she sat working in the firing room.
Morgan said that she encountered "everything from obscene phone calls to men following me in the stairwell ... like mosquitoes," she said. "We had a lot of mosquitoes."”
Read more at
https://www.space.com/women-trailblazers-nasa-apollo-glass-ceiling.html
Back to top.14. How Do You Tell Colombian Kids A Science Yarn? With Crochet!
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Andrew Wight
“Ana Maria Porras, 31, a Cornell University biomedical engineer, has found the perfect hook to get kids interested in science – a crochet hook.
Porras was recently announced as one of the AAAS IF/THEN Ambassadors, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies, seeking to empower women scientists in STEAM fields to inspire the next generation – and she hopes to use this platform to keep reaching out via crochet.”
Read more at
Back to top.15. Job Opportunities
For those interested in increasing excellence and diversity in their
organizations, a list of resources and advice is here:
https://cswa.aas.org/diversity.html#howtoincrease
Assistant Professor, Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Florida
https://apply.interfolio.com/68764
Tenure-Track/Tenured Faculty Positions in Data Science for Large Astronomical Surveys https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/9d06bcbb
Back to top.16. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
To submit an item to the AASWOMEN newsletter, including replies to topics, send email to aaswomen_at_aas.org
All material will be posted unless you tell us otherwise, including your email address.
When submitting a job posting for inclusion in the newsletter, please include a one-line description and a link to the full job posting.
Please remember to replace "_at_" in the e-mail address above.
Back to top.17. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
Join AAS Women List by email:
Send an email to aaswomen_at_lists.aas.org. A list moderator will add your email to the list. They will reply to your message to confirm that they have added you.
Join AAS Women List through the online portal:
Go to https://lists.aas.org/postorius/lists/aaswlist.lists.aas.org and enter the email address you wish to subscribe in the ‘Your email address’ field. You will receive an email from ‘aaswlist-confirm’ that you must reply to. There may be a delay between entering your email and receiving the confirmation message. Check your Spam or Junk mail folders for the message if you have not received it after 2 hours.
To unsubscribe from AAS Women by email:
Send an email to aaswlist-leave_at_lists.aas.org from the email address you wish to remove from the list. You will receive an email from ‘aaswlist-confirm’ that you must reply to which will complete the unsubscribe.
Leave AAS Women or change your membership settings through the online portal:
Go to https://lists.aas.org/accounts/signup to create an account with the online portal. After confirming your account you can see the lists you are subscribed to and update your settings.
Back to top.18. Access to Past Issues
https://cswa.aas.org/AASWOMEN.html
Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.
Back to top.
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