Friday, June 3, 2022

AASWomen Newsletter for June 3, 2022

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of June 3, 2022
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Alessandra Aloisi, and Sethanne Howard

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Crosspost: The other physics problem
2. Crosspost: First-ever study of LGBT+ experiences in physics reveals red flags
3. New Book: The Sky is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in Their Own Words
4. The Australian Academy of Science champions diversity in STEM
5. Women more likely to win awards that are not named after men
6. Small step for Nature, giant leap across the gender gap: leading journal will make sex and gender reporting mandatory in research
7. Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
8. Not feeling recognized as a physics person by instructors and teaching assistants is correlated with female students’ lower grades
9. Breaking The Mold Of What A Scientist Looks Like
10. A Mathematician’s Unanticipated Journey Through the Physical World
11. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

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1. Crosspost: The other physics problem
From: Bryne Hadnott via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

By R.M. Davis for symmetry magazine

Alexander Gardner mailed his application to North Carolina A&T from what was likely a military prison cell somewhere in the US South. … [He] had been incarcerated for punching a commanding officer who called him a racial slur. He had only an 8th grade education, but North Carolina A&T—a university located in Greensboro, NC—saw his potential. They accepted him, and he graduated in 1958 with a degree in engineering physics. Five years later, Gardner became the first Black person to earn a physics PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He returned to North Carolina A&T the year after that, this time as a member of the physics faculty.

Read more at

https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2022/06/crosspost-other-physics-problem.html

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2. Crosspost: First-ever study of LGBT+ experiences in physics reveals red flags
From: Bryne Hadnott via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

Written by Kim Lamke Calderón for Phys.org

LGBT+ physicists often face harassment and other behaviors that make them leave the profession, according to a new study, which comes as physics as a discipline has attempted to grapple with equity and inclusion issues.

The authors found that the two biggest factors that influence a person's decision to leave physics are the overall climate of the organization they belong to and more specifically observing exclusionary behavior.

Read more at

https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2022/06/crosspost-first-ever-study-of-lgbt.html

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3. New Book: The Sky is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in Their Own Words  
From: From: David Weintraub [weintrda_at_gmail.com] and Virginia Trimble [vtrimble_at_uci.edu]
 
We are writing to let you know of our forthcoming book, “The Sky Is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in Their Own Words”, to be released by Princeton University Press on 21 June, 2022 in the US and 16 August 2022 in the UK.

As described by the publisher, “The Sky Is for Everyone” is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical essays by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. … before 1900, a woman who wanted to study the stars had to have a father, brother, or husband to provide entry, and how the considerable intellectual skills of women astronomers were still not enough to enable them to pry open doors of opportunity for much of the twentieth century. After decades of difficult struggles, women are closer to equality in astronomy than ever before. Trimble and Weintraub bring together the stories of the tough and determined women who flung the doors wide open.  

Read more and see the list of contributors at

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691207100/the-sky-is-for-everyone

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4. The Australian Academy of Science champions diversity in STEM
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]

The Australian Academy of Sciences has announced its 2022 Fellows for outstanding contributions to science. Among the newly elected fellows is Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths, who was recognised for proving the existence of a new spiral arm of the Milky Way and otherwise advancing our understanding of our own and neighbouring galaxies. McClure-Griffiths has also helped design multiple radio telescope facilities, including the planned globe-spanning Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project.

Included among the Fellows are two "firsts": the first elected Fellow who identifies as an Aboriginal person, Tom Calma AO, and the first Australian of Indian heritage to be elected president of the Academy, Chennupati Jagadish AC.
 
Read more at

https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/the-australian-academy-of-science-champions-diversity-in-stem/

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5. Women more likely to win awards that are not named after men
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]

By Elizabeth Gibney

Women are more likely to win awards that aren’t named after a person than prizes named after a man, research has found. ... The results suggest that there might be a link between the name of an award and who receives it, he says. “If the awards are not named after a person, the gender balance in prizes is more balanced,” says Stefan Krause, an Earth and environmental scientist at the University of Birmingham, UK

Read more at

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021EA002188

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6. Small step for Nature, giant leap across the gender gap: leading journal will make sex and gender reporting mandatory in research
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]

By Kelly Burrowes

Come June, researchers who submit papers to a subset of the Nature Portfolio journals ... will need to describe whether, and how, sex and gender are considered in study design. If no sex and gender analyses were carried out, authors will need to clarify why. This will apply to work with human participants, as well as other vertebrate animals and cell experimental studies. So in the same way that ethics approval, clinical trials registration, or informed consent must be demonstrated where relevant, so too will consideration of sex and gender.

Read more at

https://theconversation.com/small-step-for-nature-giant-leap-across-the-gender-gap-leading-journal-will-make-sex-and-gender-reporting-mandatory-in-research-183631

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7. Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

By Virginia Gewin

A wave of departures, many of them by mid-career scientists, calls attention to widespread discontent in universities.

Read more at

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01512-6


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8. Not feeling recognized as a physics person by instructors and teaching assistants is correlated with female students’ lower grades
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

In a recent study, Sonja Cwik and Chandralekha Singh (University of Pittsburgh) reported that women had lower perceived recognition than men as a physics person and their perceived recognition played an important role in predicting course grades controlling for high school GPA and math SAT scores.

Read the peer-reviewed article at

https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.010138

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9. Breaking The Mold Of What A Scientist Looks Like
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]

The title of the book, "No Boundaries: 25 Women Explorers and Scientists Share Adventures, Inspiration, and Advice" by Gabby Salazar and Clare Fieseler, says it all. In this excerpt, Dr. Danielle Lee, describes an experience that's likely common to a lot of us: "Even when someone knows that a scientist will be coming by, I’ll show up and they’ll say, ‘We’re waiting on a scientist,’ I say, ‘That’s me. I’m the scientist.’ Even today, we still have to educate people that scientists come in different packages.”

Read more at

https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/women-girls-science-animals/


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10. A Mathematician’s Unanticipated Journey Through the Physical World
From: John Wenzel [jwenzel_at_albion.edu]

By Kevin Hartnett

The outline of Lauren Williams’ mathematical career was present very early on in her life. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved patterns,” said Williams. “I enjoyed being given a sequence of numbers and having to find the pattern and predict the next number.”

But while many kids are enchanted by patterns, few end up following them as far, or to such unexpected places, as Williams has. As a professor at Harvard University — where she became only the second tenured woman mathematician in the university’s history — she has uncovered correspondences far more bewildering than anything she learned in grade school.

Read more at

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-mathematicians-adventure-through-the-physical-world-20201216/?

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11. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

To submit an item to the AASWOMEN newsletter, including replies to topics, send email to aaswomen_at_lists.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.

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12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

Join AAS Women List through the online portal:

To Subscribe, go to https://aas.simplelists.com, and in the "Subscribe" area, add in your name, email address, select "The AASWomen Weekly Newsletter", and click subscribe.  You will be sent an email with a link to click to confirm subscription.

To unsubscribe from AAS Women by email:

Go to https://aas.simplelists.com, in the "My account and unsubscriptions", type your email address. You will receive an email with a link to access your account, from there you can click the unsubscribe link for this mailing list.

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13. Access to Past Issues

https://aas.org/comms/cswa/AASWOMEN

Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.

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