Issue of November 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. Physics and Astronomy SEA Change Updates
2. AAS Education Committee Announces Eight Winners of 2024 EPD Mini-Grants
3. Become an ambassador for Women and Girls in Science and Technology!
4. ‘We need more women,’ says only female winner of Millennium Technology prize
5. Lisa M. P. Munoz on the Gender Gap in Science
6. Black women teaching science find formula for incorporating anti-racist practices, study finds
7. The Woman Who Demonstrated the Greenhouse Effect
8. Rewarding women more like men could reduce wage gap
9. The European Space Agency may have a bullying problem
10. NASA FINESST Graduate Student Research Proposals
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.
Physics and Astronomy (P/A) SEA Change has been up to quite a bit since our initial AAS CSWA blog article and the cross-post from the SPS Radiations magazine. If you don’t remember, SEA = STEMM (two Ms- one is for “medicine”) Equity Achievement (SEA).
The broader SEA Change goal is to support continual, data-informed systemic change regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in postsecondary STEMM education acad The SEA Change process entails undergoing a comprehensive self-assessment for populations (i.e., students, faculty, staff) and disaggregating the data (when possible) especially for race, gender, and intersections of these identities, among other demographics. Topics include policies, procedures, recruiting strategies, culture, climate, and outcomes. Both qualitative and quantitative data are used to understand the context. After looking at the data and considering what is possible in one’s given context, a 5-year action plan is created. The action plan needs metrics to ensure specified actions are indeed improving some aspect of equity, diversity, and inclusion. The action plan, along with a narrative that describes what was learned, is reviewed. If awarded with a Bronze Award, the action plan is implemented. At the end of 5 years, the department can reapply for the award.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2023/11/physics-and-astronomy-sea-change-updates.html
By Tom Rice (AAS)
The AAS Education Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023–2024 award cycle for our Education & Professional Development (EPD) Mini-Grant program. We are proud to provide full or partial funding to eight programs, six of which will take place as workshops at the winter AAS meeting in New Orleans, while the other two programs will happen later in 2024. To stay in the loop, you can sign up for the AAS Education Biweekly Newsletter. Please congratulate these winners! We hope you engage with the following education & professional development resources.
Read more at
https://aas.org/posts/news/2023/10/education-committee-announces-eight-winners-2024-epd-mini-grants
By CERN
For the eighth year running, CERN, the UNIGE Faculty of Science, EPFL and the Laboratoire d'Annecy de Physique des Particules (LAPP) are joining forces to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. During the week of 5 to 9 February 2024, female scientists and engineers will be visiting local schools to inspire younger generations to explore the world of science.
As a female science ambassador, you will talk about your career path, share your projects and professional experiences and maybe even give a short demonstration. Our aim is to change the way schoolchildren view scientific, technical and technological professions, making them accessible to both girls and boys. And who knows, these presentations might even inspire some future careers!
Read more at
By James Tapper
As a Nobel laureate, Prof Frances Arnold is not short of accolades. Yet being the only woman to so far win the Millennium Technology Prize – the Nobel equivalent for engineers – is one of the least appealing.
Nominations for the €1m 2024 prize closed last week, and the organisers have revealed that women formed just 16.3% of nominees, the highest of any year since the biennial award’s launch in 2004, apart from the 28.1% put forward in 2022.
Read more at
By Literary Hub
Andrew Keen talks to Lisa M.P. Munoz, author of Women in Science Now, about implicit bias, leaky pipelines, tokenization and other explanations for the persistent gender gap in science.
Watch the interview at
https://lithub.com/lisa-m-p-munoz-on-the-gender-gap-in-science/
By New York University
Whether teaching about the practices and systems that led to high rates of diabetes in Black communities or discussions about the Flint water crisis, Black female science teachers are finding ways to incorporate anti-racist teaching in their classrooms, according to a new study by science education researchers.
In a series of interviews and Sista Circles (group settings for Black women to develop and exchange ideas) in 2020, 18 Black women (teaching grades 5-12) shared their teaching practices and efforts to build critical consciousness among their students and colleagues, and connect history and culture to science. The findings are published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.
Read more at
Read the full journal article at
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.21912
By Zoe Kurland, Katie Hafner, Elah Feder, The Lost Women of Science Initiative
In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in sunlight and found that it heated up much more than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet.
Several years later a Irish scientist named John Tyndall conducted a far more complicated experiment that demonstrated the same effect and revealed how it worked. Today Tyndall is widely known as the man who discovered the greenhouse gas effect. There’s even a crater on the moon named for him! Newton Foote, meanwhile, was lost to history—until an amateur historian stumbled on her story.
Listen to the podcast or read the transcript at
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-woman-who-demonstrated-the-greenhouse-effect/
By Cornell University
Addressing the shortage of women in STEM-related fields such as computer science is not enough to close the gender gap in both representation and pay, according to Cornell University research. Treating women more like men, especially on pay day, is more important than representation alone.
In two recently published papers, Sharon Sassler, professor of sociology, and colleagues examine the field of computer science (CS) and how women who major in and work in the field fare. Though women’s representation in STEM fields generally has increased in recent decades, their presence in the CS workforce – which accounts for about half the jobs in STEM fields – remains low, and the gender wage gap in computer science persists.
“It’s not the composition of women in STEM – it’s the returns that they experience for the very same attributes as their male counterparts, such as degree attainment,” said Sassler, co-author of “Factors Shaping the Gender Wage Gap Among College-Educated Computer Science Workers,” which published Oct. 30 in PLOS-ONE.
Read more at
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1007098
Read the full journal article at
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293300
By Tereza Pultarova
For many European space enthusiasts, a job at ESA is a dream. But as 18 different sources who spoke to Ars Technica have described their experience, the dream often turns bad as ESA’s corporate environment appears to suffer from bullying, and employees find little in the way of protection.
ESA denies the problem, citing internal anti-harassment policies, but internal documents reviewed by Ars that date back to the late 2000s suggest that, depending on the ESA facility, between 30 and 50 percent of the people working there said they had witnessed harassment. These internal surveys describe the same problems—ostracism, undermining employees, and threats to employment—mentioned by our sources.
“The most common example of harassment behaviors concerned the way in which contractors are treated,” one of the documents says, “and this was an issue identified by both contractors and staff members alike.”
Read more at
By NASA
Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST F.5) solicits proposals from accredited U.S. universities and other eligible organizations for graduate student-designed and performed research projects that contribute to Science Mission Directorate’s (SMD) science, technology, and exploration goals. The graduate student shall have the primary initiative to define the proposed FINESST research project and must be the primary author, with input or supervision from the proposal's Principal Investigator (PI) or mentor, as appropriate. The proposal must present a well-defined research problem/activity and a justification of its scientific significance to NASA. FINESST awards are research grants for up to three years and up to $50K per year.
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
- Assistant Professor in Astronomy, Weber State University, Ogden, UT
https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/a66878ac
- Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State University, State College, PA
https://psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic/job/Penn-State-University-Park/Tenured-or-Tenure-Track-Faculty-Position-in-Astronomy-and-Astrophysics_REQ_0000050140
- Tenure Track Positions in Physics (all areas), Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA
https://jobs.calpoly.edu/en-us/job/533513/tenure-track-position-physics
- Lecturer in Astronomy, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT
https://legacy.drup2.uvm.edu/cems/lecturer-physics
- Assistant Professor in Astronomy, Columbia University, New York, NY
https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/1ddb6b8a
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