Issue of February 10, 2023
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell
[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]
This week's issues:
1. NOIRLab’s Dara Norman President-Elect of the American Astronomical Society
2. Former NSF director France Córdova honored
3. Building a future of scientific progress and gender equality
4. The essentiality of diversity in STEM education
5. What Does It Mean To Be A “Woman In Science”?
6. Not blaming women is key to increasing their presence in tech professions
7. Editorial: Using our voices
8. Biologist fired for sexual misconduct gets money from private donors to start new lab
9. Job Opportunities
10. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
11. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
12. 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 NOIRLab
"Dara Norman, NOIRLab’s Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) Deputy Director, has been elected President of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). She will serve as President-Elect for the next year and will begin her two-year term as President in June 2024."
Read more at
https://noirlab.edu/public/announcements/ann23008/
By National Science Foundation
"Every picture tells a story. Each portrait in the gallery of directors at the U.S. National Science Foundation headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, is a chapter in the U.S. science and engineering enterprise. The newest portrait, of the 14th NSF Director France Córdova, was unveiled in a ceremony honoring her legacy and contributions to the NSF story.
"France embodies the very spirit of NSF, and this is reflected in her many accomplishments as director," said Sethuraman Panchanathan, 15th and current director of NSF.
Córdova lead NSF from March 2014 to March 2020 and oversaw a tremendous period of discovery at the agency. During her tenure, the NSF-powered Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected, for the first time in history, ripples in space-time. These gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity 100 years earlier. Additionally, she oversaw the discovery of the first image of a black hole, discovered by the NSF-supported Event Horizon Telescope. This set the stage for the EHT's most recent discovery, Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way."
Read more at
https://beta.nsf.gov/science-matters/nsf-directors-portrait-unveiling
By Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women
"Despite their many achievements, women and girls remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Globally they are a minority of students in STEM education, at only 35 per cent, with just 3 per cent studying information and communication technology.
This directly reflects the discrimination faced by women and girls around the world. It is even more true for more marginalized women and girls, such as indigenous and afro-descendant women, women with disabilities, women in rural areas, women on the move, elderly women, LGBTIQ+ communities and adolescent girls. It starts in their early years and is shaped and reinforced by gender stereotypes and norms. These can be found embedded in curricula, textbooks, and teaching and learning practices. The choices imposed upon girls in school shape their careers and employment opportunities as adults.
When young women look at careers in STEM they find a strongly male-dominated culture. If you cannot see it you cannot be it, and thus continues a cycle of limited representation."
Read more at
By Rachel Youngman
"Rachel Youngman, leading advocate for equality, diversity, inclusion and ethical leadership and Deputy CEO at the Institute of Physics (IOP), explores the essentiality of diversity in STEM education, particularly physics."
Read more at
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/essentiality-diversity-stem-education-physics-skills/152831/
By Ann Willis
"When I’m asked what it means to be a woman in science, I immediately pause and look at the question from a more fundamental level: what does it mean to be a person in science?
For my entire childhood and adolescence, I only had one image of a scientist: a man in a lab coat with a microscope, hunched over a world reduced to energy and particles. I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising: my dad was a chemist and spent his entire career working in labs, trying to make people’s lives better by looking for new ways to treat cancer. My mother is also a scientist: a biochemist who was routinely assigned the task of writing up other men’s research, rather than being invited to participate in the fundamental work of discovery herself.
This is not an inspiring picture.
It wasn’t until I had graduated college (with an English degree) that I caught a glimpse of a different path. At 21, I experienced a lot of firsts: my first camping trip. My first rafting trip. My first multi-day rafting trip. On a six-day rafting trip on the Middle Fork Salmon River in Idaho, I felt a visceral connection to the world that I had never experienced before. I felt that I belonged, that I had value. My mind was blown and my world would never be the same again."
Read more at
https://www.americanrivers.org/2023/02/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-woman-in-science/
A new study by UN Women, an organization with a major goal of improving opportunities for women and girls in STEM fields, finds that gender inequalities have complex social and cultural origins, and advocates a variety of strategies for change, ranging from individual to social to familial aspects.
Read more at
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-blaming-women-key-presence-tech.html
Read the paper at
https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2022-12/EP.3_Milagros%20Sainz.pdf
By Sarah Tegen
"A few weeks ago, during a meeting of American Chemical Society editors in chief, I had the pleasure to hear a talk by Stanford University’s Carolyn Bertozzi, a recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She shared the prize with Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen and K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research in California. Bertozzi spoke eloquently about what it was like for her to be both an insider and an outsider in chemistry at different points throughout her career and life journey. She recounted that at times, her upbringing and her research success made her feel like a real insider, but at other times, because of her gender and her sexual orientation, she was an outsider. The conflict, confusion, and pain she expressed were palpable. Yet for her, this conflict, when mixed with her keen intellect and support systems, helped propel her to the pinnacle of our field."
Read more at
https://cen.acs.org/careers/women-in-science/Editorial-Using-voices/101/i5
In an all-too-familiar pattern, a senior scientist who was fired for sexual misconduct is getting a second chance in the form of $25 million to start a new private lab.
Read more at
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
- Postdoctoral Researcher for Mars rover operations and analysis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/University_of_Chicago_postdoc_ad_2023_Mars_rover_and_orbiter_data_analysis.pdf
- Instrument Support Astronomer, Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, Tucson, AZ
https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/aff4e11d
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