Issue of April 19, 2024
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: Women at NASA Support Human Spaceflight
2. Global Star Party
3. Making Space for Women in Astronomy
4. Advancing gender equity within STEM fields
5. The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses
6. Hackathon 3
7. Women end up doing the academic housework
8. Survey on financial scarcity and poverty
9. ‘Shrugging off failure is hard’: the $400-million grant setback that shaped the Smithsonian lead scientist’s career
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.
On April 12 the United nations celebrated the International Day Human Spaceflight in honor of Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet citiaen, who conducted the first human space flight. This historic event opened the way for space exporation for the benefit of humanity.
Women at all the NASA centers have worked - for decades - to support those efforts. Here are just a few of them.
Read more at:
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2024/04/women-at-nasa-support-human-spaceflight.html
By: April Russell
Inspired by the 100 hours of astronomy, this annual offshoot began upon the inception of Astronomers Without Borders and remains one of its flagship programs.
A mix of various programs ranging from Astro Arts to Observational Programs, this festival runs the whole month of April and features partners and that creates a larger community of astronomy enthusiasts that span the globe.
Whether you own a telescope, binoculars or are just using your eyes, the Global Star Party events are simple celebrations of "looking up"! These are All Hands on Deck call-outs when our 500+ affiliates along with our 42+ National Coordinators connect with their communities and celebrate with the world. It happens all on one day. Our highly knowledgeable and eager members reach out, teach, and share their knowledge.
Starts: Apr 26, 2024 15:00 (UTC) Ends: Apr 27, 2024 21:00 (UTC)
Read more at
https://astronomerswithoutborders.org/programs/global-astronomy-month/gam2024-main
By: Michal Meyer
Sometimes a picture is worth more than a thousand words: it’s worth a thousand stories. The recent New York Times piece about the first successful imaging of a black hole highlights the technology that went into making that picture possible: eight radio telescopes scattered around the world were synced together, making them able to see far better than with a single telescope. These images were then combined into the final picture with the help of code developed by a team that included postdoctoral research fellow Kate Bouman. Her surprised and delighted reaction on seeing the black hole went viral along with the image itself. Then sexist trolls began to attack Bouman and minimize her work. It’s disheartening to know that even in the 21st century, women scientists are still treated very differently than their male counterparts.
Read more at:
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/making-space-for-women-in-astronomy/
By: The National Girls Collaborative Project
The National Girls Collaborative Project, in partnership with the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC), invites you to join a growing movement of museums, institutions, and individuals across the United States committed to advancing gender equity within STEM fields.
The IF/THEN® Champions Network is a new network for individuals and ASTC-member organizations interested in championing the IF/THEN® Collection, the largest free resource dedicated to disseminating authentic and relatable images of real women in STEM. The IF/THEN® Champions Network offers two membership levels, organizational and individual, at no cost.
Read more at:
https://www.astc.org/ifthen/champions-network/
By: Scientific American
This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that was visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and Canada on April 8, 2024.
It is December 1897 in England, and Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer, is boarding a steamship bound for India. Her goal: to photograph a total solar eclipse. Like the many people in North America whose gaze will turn upward on April 8, Maunder was fascinated by the secrets of the sun and was determined to travel the globe and unlock them. She understood that the few minutes of darkness during a solar eclipse presented a special opportunity to explore the nature of the sun. Her observations led to our greater understanding of how our star affects Earth, but like so many early female scientists, her contributions and achievements have been forgotten.
Read more at:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-victorian-woman-who-chased-eclipses/
By: Annie Lennox
Since the 1990s the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has set the guidelines for naming planetary features (e.g., impact craters) of bodies in our solar system. Fewer than 12% of craters on Mercury are named after women, and this figure shrinks to 2% for craters on Mars and the Moon. This issue is not limited to gender. For more information, contact stem-sps-outreach_at_open.ac.uk .
Read more at:
By: Gunn Kvalsvik
The findings of a new study from Danish academia are clear: Men dodge service jobs, leaving them to women.
The findings were so clear that even the researchers were surprised.
“I’ve been interested in gender in working life for many years, but this is the first time I have looked at what happens in my own backyard, at university,” says Nanna Mik-Meyer, professor at Copenhagen Business School.
“I'm not shocked by the results, but I didn't expect the gender patterns to be so obvious,” explains the sociology professor, who wrote the article together with Margaretha Järvinen, professor at the University of Copenhagen.
Read more at:
https://kifinfo.no/en/2024/03/women-end-doing-academic-housework
By: AAS
A team of astronomy faculty, graduate students, and members of the AAS Committeefor the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA) is conducting a study on whether the field of astronomy equitably includes people from backgrounds of financial scarcity and poverty. To accomplish this, the study group asks that astronomersand ex-astronomers at all levels (faculty/staff, postdocs, students, and those who have left the field) participate in an anonymous survey.
Participation in the survey will take about 15 minutes. Results of the survey will be used to inform the astronomical communityon the severity of underrepresentation (if found) of people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, to motivate future studies on the issue, and to begin to develop paths toward improving the diversity of our field.
Questions about the survey can be addressed to the study lead Dr.Carlos J. Vargas. [Astr-poverty-survey_at_arizona.edu]
The survey is at:
https://aas.org/posts/news/2024/03/aas-csma-astro-poverty-survey
By: Anne Gulland, Nature
In 2021, planetary scientist Ellen Stofan was appointed undersecretary of science and research at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the US national research and museum complex. There, she oversees its scientific research centres as well as the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of Natural History and the National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Before this, she was director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where she launched a 7-year restoration of the building and oversaw celebrations marking 50 years since the first Moon landing. Stofan’s doctoral research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, focused on the geology of Venus.
Before joining the Smithsonian, she spent some 25 years working in space-related organizations — including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and as the agency’s chief scientist. She helped to develop NASA’s plan to get humans to Mars and worked on the Magellan mission to Venus and the 13-year Cassini mission that documented Saturn and its moons. Describe a typical day.
"My portfolio is really broad, so there’s no typical day. I might be having a meeting about bringing pandas back to the zoo in Washington DC, or discussing how to dispose of the Smithsonian’s collection of human remains in an ethical way. Or talking about the budget — it’s always the budget.
Not getting the grant was devastating — not just for me, but for the team. I felt like I had let them down. For a while, I couldn’t talk about the project without crying. I thought about leaving science, because I didn’t see how anything could ever match that."
Read more at:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01108-2
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