Perspectives of Early Career Astronomers Through the Lenses of Diversity, Work-Life Balance, and Mentoring

Perspectives of Early Career Astronomers Through the Lenses of Diversity, Work-Life Balance, and Mentoring: A recap of the AAS238 CSWA Splinter Session

By Jessica Mink, Amber Stuver, and Heather Flewelling

The 2021 documentary, Picture a Scientist, exposed the harassment and discrimination that women of all career levels experience in STEM. One part of the Strategic Plan of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) is to collaborate with the other inclusion and diversity advocacy groups within the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to address gender-based discrimination, which concerns all of us. Leakage from the career progression pipeline has been a major concern for all of us, so we thought that a public discussion of obstacles and strategies for early career astronomers would be a good initial topic.

For this splinter session, we included the following panelists:

SGMA: Adam L.W.Harvey - graduate student                                                         

CSWA: MelindaSoares-Furtado - postdoc                                                              

WGAD: JackieMonkiewicz - postdoc                                                                         

DPS PCCS: Serina Diniega - scientist

During the splinter session, we asked the panelists a series of questions and have summarized the key points of the discussion as bulleted points below.

How can diverse categories of astronomers be supported in their education to complete their degrees?

• Get help finding co-mentors who are more capable of advising you along whatever axes are relevant
• Find people like yourself and support each other.  Make this easy. Community is very important, but often lacking.
• Support them! Find other people who are closer to their status.
• Careers shouldn't be in the hands of only one close advisor.
• Time to graduation should be allowed to grow without penalty.
• Students who need to take off time shouldn't be penalized.
• Academic culture is a problem. There are a lot of obstacles and challenges that don’t need to be there. Bring actionable discussion on how people should act           

What advice do you have for a mentor who is working with astronomers who identify along a different axis than they do?  What should they know that many don’t seem to have thought about? What qualities of a mentor make them effective?

• Good mentors provide affirmation. Unsatisfactory mentoring can lead to a toxic relationship.
• If you are a mentor, use Google to find failure modes of mentoring marginalized groups, to help you learn how to be a better mentor
• Advisors often keep moving the goalposts. Set them, and leave them there. Grad school does not work like earlier schooling, but more like the work world. As such, you can do your best and it may not be not good enough
• There’s a myth of innate talent: People have it or never will. You're cut out or not cut out. But graduate school is not a priesthood. Once you're in, you’re all wheat, not chaff.
• It's too easy for advisors to drop the ball. Things all too often fall through if they only affect the student., because the academic system does not necessarily reward work which does not directly contribute to an advisor’s academic record
• It is on you as a mentor to figure it out, don’t put it on the student

Have you ever felt unsafe/threatened at any point in your career?  How can the astronomy community come together to prevent things like this from happening to others?

• Support your students to keep them out of bad situations or get them out so that they don’t have to skip activities if they've been harassed at them.
• It’s hard to call out bad behavior, but it hurts scientists' careers if they avoid conferences or other work related events because they don’t feel safe
• Coming out as non-binary led to social isolation, which affected performance. There’s a need to be discussed and addressed. 
• Conferences / workplaces / research groups need  a code of conduct, reporting mechanisms, enforcement of the code of conduct, and consequences need to be imposed on those who don’t follow it. 
• Codes of conduct with enforcement and consequences can come from funding agencies. That’s where the power is.
• Help people who’ve been harmed to succeed in their career

Is there anything that you feel that you cannot do or say that your peers can for fear that it will affect your career? How have you dealt with it?

• One can speak before they think, though age brings carefulness. It's hard to talk about discrimination against yourself, but easier about discrimination against others.
• It’s hard to talk about having a nontraditional background or being a mother. I tried to blend in like everyone else as a scientist so that I was taken seriously.
• Outreach is not always respected as a professional activity.
• I’ve been vocal about issues on campus, but not comfortable about pushing for change in my own situation, so I gave up.
• Being marked as an activist can be near-fatal to a career. When you do anything other than science, you're seen as distracted.

Have you felt that having a family conflicted with your career advancement?  What are/were your concerns? What changes can be made to support astronomers with families?

• Strengths come with being a parent in academia, and stubbornness of purpose. Two kids looking up at you can make you feel appreciated.
• Banding together helps. Some campuses are better than others. 43% of women leave full-time STEM employment after their first child and 23% of men.  An unpublished study finds that this may be as high for women as 70% in the physical sciences. See links to other articles below.
• “You can have it all” is not true. Getting a degree, having a disability, having kids - are all full-time jobs.

Question from the panel attendees: What  red flags should we look for?

• Conferences and journals need to be accessible for neuroatypical individuals. WGAD has several documents  that provide advice on how to do this..
• 80-100 working hours/week for graduate students is absurd, but there are people who believe it. Ask anyone you want to work with whether they believe it. Good: it's awful; maybe work with them. Bad: they know that they can't say they agree, so they squirm uncomfortably; consider whether you want to commit to that institution.
• How do people talk about other students? Seeing the best in others is not a fault.
• Red Flags for people: personal issues, such as mismatched attitude toward work, and personal issues within work groups as well.
• Red flags for institutions: If there are no written policies, there are expectations that can vary for any reason. They also may not have thought about how their institution (or department) works.

Acronym meanings with resource links from above:

CSWA:   Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy
CSMA:   Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy
SGMA:  Committee for Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities in Astronomy
WGAD: Working Group on Accessibility and Disability
PCCS:    DPS Professional Culture & Climate Subcommittee

Additional Useful Links:

Myth of the Missing Mothers (2009) 
Science and gender: Scientists must work harder on equality (2015)
Picture a Scientist, a free PBS/Nova documentary (2021)