Issue of January 20, 2023
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. Cross-post: Researchers blast US agency's decision not to collect LGBT+ data
2. Interdisciplinary conference on Invisible Labor in Astronomy and Astrophysics
3. Nominate a Plenary Speaker for AAS Meetings
4. Leadership in science: how female researchers are breaking up the boys’ club
5. The International Society of Nonbinary Scientists is Making Its Own Rules
6. Team members solicited for Roman Space Telescope
7. Boosting Black Women In Physics With The Aim Of Making A Big Bang In Business
8. Ethics in physics: The need for culture change
9. A top U.S. science oversight board is about to get much more diverse
10. Gender inequality and self-publication are common among academic editors
11. Job Opportunities
12. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
13. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
14. Access to Past Issues
An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.
By Max Kozlov for Nature
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided not to include a question about sexual orientation on one of its workforce surveys, setting off a social-media firestorm. More than 1,700 researchers have now signed an open letter urging the agency’s director to reconsider the decision. They argue that it is crucial to collect such information to understand the makeup of the scientific community and craft policies that lessen disparities for sexual minorities.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2023/01/researchers-blast-us-agencys-decision.html
By Kristine Palmieri [kpalmieri_at_uchicago.edu]
There will be a conference in September 2023 at the University of Chicago. The interdisciplinary conference will be on Invisible Labor in Astronomy and Astrophysics to accompany the untold history of women at Yerkes Observatory 1900-1930. They are soliciting proposals for individual presentations, organized panels, and workshops. The Deadline for submission is Monday, February 28, 2023. All submissions must be made online through the submission platform (https://forms.gle/3qf7SMPvTETCWAdn7).
Final decisions on paper and submission acceptance will be announced in late March.
Questions can be directed to Kristine Palmieri (kpalmieri_at_uchicago.edu).
One of the central features of the AAS summer and winter meetings is their plenary talks spanning the full breadth of astrophysics. Some plenaries are given by prize winners from the AAS and other organizations, while other speakers are selected by the AAS Vice Presidents (VPs). Most plenary talks present science content, but talks on the state of the profession, demographics, and societal issues of relevance to the astronomical community are also regularly scheduled.
The VPs solicit nominations from the community for potential plenary speakers and/or topics. We seek dynamic speakers who can deliver engaging, visual-rich presentations to a general audience of astronomers, on topics that are of broad interest to the community. On the nomination form, please provide specific information on the candidate’s speaking ability. This is especially important for candidates from under-represented groups and institutions and early-career scientists — they may be less well-known, but we really want to provide speaking opportunities for them. The candidate speaker list will not necessarily be limited to those nominated by the community. Self-nominations are accepted.
Read more at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSft7F8YMNlI12JKZHeQUhqDpjQveEmuNVRZKJ5F8vwAQ3rPgA/viewform
By Julie Gould
"How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders? These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of different sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series.
In this episode, Charu Kaushic, a research group leader at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, says that leadership is more than just exercising power, competence and confidence, it is also about wanting to do good. Kaushic, who is also scientific director of the Canadian Institute of Infection and Immunity in Ottawa, describes how a better gender balance in science’s senior ranks will lead to a more consensual style of leading teams."
Listen to the podcast and read the transcript at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00061-w
By Fern Alling
"The International Society of Nonbinary Scientists (ISNBS) began as a humble group chat. Thirty members strong, it was an informal space for nonbinary academics to socialize. Then Riley DeHority, a Biological Systems Engineering Ph.D. student, made a website.
The website included a mock application with just two questions: “Are you nonbinary?” and “are you a scientist?” DeHority didn’t expect anything to come from it; the site was mostly an inside joke. But when another member tweeted about it, 132 responses to the “application” flooded in in a single day. And they kept coming.
At 727 members and counting, ISNBS now has a serious website. There’s still a group chat, but members also attend regular meetings. Those feeling especially ambitious can deepen their involvement by taking on a project or two. Some members run peer mentoring groups. Others volunteer to be liaisons, bridges between ISNBS and their institution. A formal survey documenting the group’s needs and a 2023 conference are in the works as well."
Read more at
https://www.intomore.com/science/international-society-nonbinary-scientists-making-rules/
See the ISNBS website at
Roman Mission Research and Support Participation Opportunities (ROSES-D.14) solicits proposals to work on preparation for the operational phase of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, in one of three categories:
1) Wide Field Instrument Science, which supports investigations that prepare for and/or enhance the science return of Roman that can be addressed with its Wide Field Instrument (WFI); 2) WFI Project Infrastructure Teams who will work with the Science Centers to develop scientific infrastructure to pursue Roman’s science goals in cosmology and exoplanet demographics; and 3) Coronagraph Community Participation Program for individuals or very small teams to work with the Coronagraph Instrument team to prepare for and execute its technology demonstration observations.
ROSES-2022 Amendment 78 releases the final text for this program element, which had previously been released as draft for community comment. Notices of Intent are not mandatory, and the proposal due date is March 21, 2023.
Read more at
By Jared Council
"It doesn’t take an astrophysicist to see the lack of representation in the world of scientific research, but it took one to do something about it.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who has a PhD in cosmology, said Black women who study physics have long been overlooked and under-cited, especially if they lack ties to prestigious institutions. So Prescod-Weinstein led a multi-year effort to create a list of all the professional publications by Black women with PhDs in physics-related disciplines with the goal of helping illuminate them and their work.
The database, released last month, has about 4,000 entries with links to published works by nearly 180 women and gender minorities, Prescod-Weinstein told Forbes. It covers 50 years of research and is believed to be the first database in any field of science focused on the work of Black women."
Read more at
https://apple.news/A4DSSMEucQSSxWJDrAKANNA
See the database at
https://chanda.substack.com/p/celebrate-50-years-of-phds-cite-black
By Frances Houle, Kate Kirby, Michael Marder
"A new American Physical Society survey shows that although ethics education is more prevalent than it was nearly two decades ago, unethical research practices and harassment are still significant problems in the physics community."
Read more at
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.5156
By Jeffrey Mervis
"On 13 January, President Biden announced the pending appointment of seven women and one man for the eight vacancies on the National Science Board (NSB). The new class, which includes five scientists of color, will give the 24-member board a roster that features 10 women, three Black scientists, and three Latino scientists. The current 16-member roster only included three women, no Black scientists, and one Latino scientist."
Read more at
https://www.science.org/content/article/top-u-s-science-oversight-board-about-get-much-more-diverse
By Fengyuan Liu, Talal Rahwan, Bedoor AlShebli
"Editors of scientific journals are allowed to “self-publish”, i.e., to publish original research papers in the journals they edit. Occasionally, some scientists self-publish at an extreme rate and risk being questioned, possibly leading to scandals. But before we even start debating about how such behavior should be perceived, it is important to first understand the prevalence of such behavior instead of relying on anecdotes. Another important aspect that is not yet understood is the extent of gender disparity in editorial boards. To date, there are no studies that examine editorial gender disparity and editor self-publications over time and across scientific disciplines.
Our study fills this gap by analyzing an original dataset consisting of 103,000 editors from Elsevier—a publisher behind one fifth of global research output, garnering one quarter of citations worldwide. Collectively, these editors served on 85,000 issues of 1,167 Elsevier journals spanning 15 disciplines and multiple decades. Using this novel dataset, we were not only able to study self-publishing and gender disparity among editors at an unprecedented scale, but we were also able to make crucial comparisons between editors and other research-active scientists."
Read more at
Read the original paper at
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01498-1
For those interested in increasing excellence and diversity in their organizations, a list of resources and advice is here:
https://aas.org/comms/cswa/resources/Diversity#howtoincrease
- Senior Scientist for Astrobiology, at NASA Headquarters, Washington D.C. [Ed. note: Previous posting closed, reopened under this link]
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3431704255/
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