Friday, June 30, 2023

AASWomen Newsletter for June 30, 2023

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of June 30, 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. Crosspost: A Call for Action Against Harassment in Astronomy
2. This Astronomer Discovered What the Stars Were Made Of, and Few Believed Her Discovery
3. The First Black Woman To Earn A Degree In Astrophysics At University Of Wisconsin-Madison Launches New Company
4. International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES19) in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, September 2023
5. Coming out at work: transgender scientists share their stories
6. Q&A: How gender stereotypes in early learning keep girls out of maths and science
7. NASA Names Dr. Jane Rigby New Webb Telescope Senior Project Scientist
8. Spectrum: Empowering Equitable Excellence
9. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
11. 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.


1. Crosspost: A Call for Action Against Harassment in Astronomy
From: Nicolle Zellner via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

By: astrobites June 25 2023

Disclaimer: This article was edited by a group of Astrobites authors. It is not intended to be representative of the views of the AAS (which supports Astrobites) or all astronomers

"Over the years, we’ve released many statements encouraging our community to consider how we deal with abuse. With each statement, we’ve been met with hundreds of Twitter likes, tens of retweets, followed quickly by silence andthen slowly, but inevitably, the news of yet another harm that we feel obliged to comment on again.

• One of the recommendations from Astro2020 was for “professional societies [to] ensure that their scientific integrity policies address harassment and discrimination by individuals as forms of research/scientific misconduct.” How are we implementing this recommendation? • For those societies that have anti-harassment policies, how are we handling consequences for those that seriously break it? Should these consequences be adjusted? • How can we restructure authorship/publishing requirements such that astronomers, especially early career researchers (ECRs) and even more so especially students, are credited for their work without having to co-author with a known harasser? • How can we rebuild traditional structures within our academic astronomical community such that preventing harassment (of all forms) and supporting survivors is a priority?"

Read more at:

https://astrobites.org/2023/06/25/a-call-for-action-against-harassment-in-astronomy/

and

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2023/06/crosspost-call-for-action-against.html

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2. This Astronomer Discovered What the Stars Were Made Of, and Few Believed Her Discovery
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

By: Lucy Evans, Katie Hafner, The Lost Women of Science Initiative

"Cecilia Payne was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and her groundbreaking findings were ahead of their time. Continuing the legacy of women working at the Harvard College Observatory, Payne charted the way for a generation of female astronomers to come.

This episode of the Lost Women of Science Shorts follows Payne’s journey of discovery, chronicles her drive and determination against all odds and takes you to the Harvard College Observatory itself to walk in her footsteps."

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript at

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-astronomer-discovered-what-the-stars-were-made-of-and-few-believed-her-discovery/

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3. The First Black Woman To Earn A Degree In Astrophysics At University Of Wisconsin-Madison Launches New Company
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

By: Ngozi Nwanji AfroTech magazine

Back in 2018, she made history as the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s website. The milestone came 100 years after the first Black woman graduated from the university.

Read more at:

https://afrotech.com/black-woman-astrophysicist-history

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4. International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES19) in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, September 2023
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

By: ICWES19

"The 19th International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES19) will take place in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city, in September 2023. The conference theme – Shaping the Future – will offer examples of and insights for women studying and working in STEM, and their advocates, and showcase the potential of science and engineering to change the world for the better.

The conference programme, which will open with a keynote from futurist Dr Kristin Alford, includes keynote sessions focused on Antarctica, Space and the COVID-19 pandemic. An afternoon, including panel discussion, will explore how the STEM sector can become truly diverse and inclusive.”

Read more at:

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU2306/S00367/how-women-in-stem-are-shaping-the-future.htm

For more information on the conference, including registration

https://www.icwes19.com/

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5. Coming out at work: transgender scientists share their stories
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

By: Sophia Chen

To mark Pride month, transgender scientists recount transition experiences as political landscapes turn increasingly hostile in many places.

Read more at:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01908-y

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6. Q&A: How gender stereotypes in early learning keep girls out of maths and science
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

By: Juliane Hencke and Matthias Eck at UNESCO

Counting, building blocks, construction toys, writing numbers, and drawing shapes builds numeracy skills. Singing, writing, reading, telling stories, and talking about what one has done builds literacy skills. Early literacy is a fundamental skill for all subjects. It also has a high association with science achievement.

Read more at:

https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/qa-how-gender-stereotypes-early-learning-keep-girls-out-maths-and-science?hub=343

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7. NASA Names Dr. Jane Rigby New Webb Telescope Senior Project Scientist
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]

By: Rob Gutro, NASA

NASA has chosen Dr. Jane Rigby as the new senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope mission. Rigby is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, and has worked on the mission for many years.

Read More at:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nasa-names-dr-jane-rigby-new-webb-telescope-senior-project-scientist

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8. Spectrum: Empowering Equitable Excellence
From: AAS News Digest 29 June 2023

By: Natsha Latouf, George Mason University

It is well established that historical and current systemic barriers have resulted in disproportionately low rates of recruitment and retention for underrepresented minorities (URMs) in physics and astronomy. Women earn only 21% and 33% of the bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy respectively, numbers that have remained stagnant for nearly the last decade (2007-2017) despite a 46% increase in the number of physics degrees awarded in the same time period. While there have been some improvements in these numbers for women in the past few years, they still lag behind the expected values given our population. Students from underrepresented racial groups, including Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students, have not seen similar improvements, earning only ~16% of bachelor’s degrees and ~6% of PhDs in astronomy in 2014, with very little improvement since. Increasing the fraction of women and people from URMs in astronomy is important for the strength of astronomy as a discipline and for the growth of the STEM workforce.

Read more at:

https://aas.org/posts/news/2023/06/spectrum-empowering-equitable-excellence

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9. 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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10. 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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11. Access to Past Issues

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

Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.

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