Issue of July 28, 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: How a simple celebratory gathering can offer a positive outlook
2. Eunice Newton Foote: The woman who discovered the greenhouse effect
3. A pink rover tackles the red planet — and barriers for women in science
4. New projects from the IAU
5. The women behind the Manhattan Project that Nolan's new film 'Oppenheimer' completely ignored
6. Only 26 Black Women Have Ever Become Astrophysicists in the U.S. Here’s One’s Story
7. Black women's equal pay day - July 27
8. Vera Rubin
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.
By: Ilinca Ciubotariu for Nature
A few weeks ago, the annual ‘Things to Celebrate’ event took place at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana — a time to reconnect with undergraduate and graduate students, research assistants, postdoctoral fellows and faculty members. Clutching free ice cream, everyone at the event shared some of their accomplishments over the past year.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2023/07/crosspost-how-simple-celebratory.html
By Alex Wilkins
"Eunice Newton Foote, discovered the greenhouse effect and was a pivotal figure in women’s rights movements.
The discovery of the greenhouse effect is often attributed to physicist John Tyndall, who carried out a series of experiments in 1859 looking at how heat affected air. However, in 2011, amateur historian Raymond Sorenson discovered a record of a presentation of Foote’s work at the 10th annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856, two years before Tyndall’s experiments started.”
Read more at
By: Amanda Heidt
"In late May, dozens of teams travelled to tiny Hanksville, Utah, population 162, to compete in one of the world’s largest university-level robotics competitions. Held annually in a swathe of the southern Utah desert chosen for its likeness to Mars, the University Rover Challenge pits the next generation of space scientists and their rovers against one another over three days.
The Monash Nova Rover team, from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, placed second for the second consecutive year, deftly navigating its robot through Utah’s rugged badlands as it searched for life, delivered tools to astronauts and repaired a mock lander. But beyond its engineering prowess, the team was notable this year for another reason. In a competition largely dominated by men, women made up roughly half of the team’s leadership, and the group’s rover — named Waratah, after an endemic Australian flower — is a glaringly hot shade of pink, impossible to miss amid a sea of black and silver competitors. “It’s a conversation starter because it’s an antithesis, and it shouldn’t be,” says Chloe Chang, a fifth-year robotics and mechatronics undergraduate and joint leader of the team.”
Read more at:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02344-8
By Heidi Hammel
IAU's North American Regional Office of Astronomy for Development announcesnew projects to receive funding as part of the Women and Girls in Astronomy Program (WGAP). WGAP aims to inspire and support women, girls, and underrepresented genders in astronomy.
Read more at
https://naroad.astro4dev.org/na-road-projects/women-and-girls-astronomy-program/
Katie Hawkinson and Jenny McGrath tell the stories of just six of the hundreds of women who made essential contributions to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. They include: chemist Lilli Hornig; scientific librarian Charlotte Serber; biologist Floy Agnes (Naranjo Stroud) Lee; physics graduate student Joan Hinton; physicist Elizabeth Graves; and physicist and future Nobel Laureate Maria Goeppert Mayer.
Read more at:
By: Rebecca Boyle
"Early in her astronomy Ph.D. program, Aomawa Shields found herself without words. She had an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but had left science for 11 years—a full solar cycle—and now she was back. It was her turn to present scientific findings to her peers, but Shields, who also had an M.F.A. in acting, developed a terrible case of stage fright. Getting ready for her talk, she was too shaky to tie her shoes.
“I guess that was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a panic attack,” Shields recalls. Helping her tie her shoes, her husband assured her she could talk circles around the others. But things didn’t improve. During her presentation, a fellow student interrupted her with a question about the rotation of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. Shields wasn’t sure how to answer, so she mimed the moon’s rotation, twirling like a hula dancer. She recalls hating the realization that she had to “break the fourth wall”—a term in theater that refers to the invisible barrier between the performers and the audience."
Read more at:
By: Maryland Commission on Women
Among full-time, year-round workers, Black women typically make only 67 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. This wage gap will typically cost Black women $1,891 per month, $22,692 per year, and $907,680 over a 40-year career. Moreover, the wage gap widens when part-year, and part-time workers are included: using this comparison, a Black woman typically makes 64 cents for every dollar a white, non-Hispanic man makes.
Read more at:
https://nwlc.org/resource/black-womens-equal-pay-day-factsheet/
By: A Mighty Girl Staff
"Vera Rubin, the pioneering astrophysicist who proved the existence of dark matter, was born on this day in 1928. Her revolutionary work was described by The New York Times as "[helping] usher in a Copernican-scale change in cosmic consciousness." Althoughshe was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993 and was long considered a front runner for the Nobel Prize in Physics, Rubin also battled sexism throughout her career, which made her both a shining role model and a ferocious advocate for women in the sciences."
Read more at:
https://www.facebook.com/amightygirl/posts/669142975243378/
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