AASWomen Newsletter for September 27, 2024

AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy
Issue of September 27, 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.]

From Item #1

This week's issues:
1. Workshopping Success Beyond Research  
2. Request for Comments: F.18 MOSAICS DRAFT Text  
3. Gender-plus analysis of Canadian science and engineering grants     
4. Job Opportunities 
5. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
6. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
7. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

Workshopping Success Beyond Research

By Emily Rice, CUNY Macaulay Honors College

Group photo of participants, outside of the Museum of Science & Industry (Chicago).

Have you ever experienced workshop whiplash, in a good way? It’s a term I just came up with to describe what I’m feeling after attending the “Empowering Diverse Voices to Communicate Science” supported by the AAPT. I had applied for the workshop on a whim, not fully knowing what to expect. It sounded interesting, fit into my schedule, and offered travel support, so I took a chance on it. Now that I’m home (after delays from the CrowdStrike debacle), I can’t believe how much I learned in just one day, and I’m eager to follow up on so many opportunities!

The workshop was organized by six scientists from across the US representing academia, national labs, and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), and career levels from graduate student to CEO. The overall format of the workshop was four independent sessions all clearly focused on the “empowering diverse voices” theme. The evening and morning before the session began, organizer Sherry Yennello (Texas A&M University), led us in some communicating and networking activities that established a collegial and supportive atmosphere that endured through to our trips home.

I’ll describe the sessions in reverse chronology because the first ended up being my favorite (though they were all very useful). In the final session Katelyn Alley (University of Oregon) explained the importance of contributing to Wikipedia and started to guide us through the process of contributing and creating new pages. Unfortunately setting up our accounts hit some snags, so we weren’t able to accomplish much, but it was enough to inspire me to consider a Wikipedia workshop for my own students. Prior to that, Prof. Malika Jeffries-EL (Boston University) led us through exploration of the entire social media landscape, and convinced us that yes, we really do need our own websites and social media accounts! She covered so much, though, that there wasn’t time to put her suggestions into practice during the workshop, which would have been helpful. Prof. Shelly Lesher (North Carolina A&T State University) used her podcast My Nuclear Life as a case study for how to think about our own science outreach and communication projects. A high-level takeaway from her workshop is to call it “public scholarship” to help our departments and institutions appreciate the value of these activities.

My favorite session was led by Dra. Nicole Cabrera Salazar, founder of Movement Consulting. I was familiar with Movement and had participated in several remote workshops a couple years ago, and my high expectations were blown out of the water! The topic was “Pitch Perfect: TED talk-style elevator speech”. Nicole guided us through creating a mood board, how to approach creating a pitch, sections of an effective pitch, the importance of timing, and several rounds of ruthless but invaluable practice. Each of us even recorded our pitches, a process that went surprisingly smoothly - too bad we didn’t have time to watch them all! I also would have loved to have craft materials available for the mood board, just to amp up the personalization and *something* of the session. I would highly recommend this workshop as a phenomenal experience for scientists at all levels, both to empower individuals and to foster networking within a group.  

I only wish the workshop was longer! Collaborative time for the last two sessions was cut short to keep us on schedule, and even then we ended up with very little time to explore our host venue, the Museum of Science & Industry. It would also have been amazing to incorporate work-life balance discussions into the workshop. Informally I learned about other participants’ personal/family lives affecting their careers (for example, having a child has been shown to alter a woman’s career in STEM more than a man’s). As a small first step, how awesome would it be to have a workshop for women in science that explicitly included children, especially at a science museum?!

My three takeaways:

1. More workshops like this, please! The boost I got from meeting so many amazing women, each impressive in their own way, was invaluable. 
2. Funding for these types of workshops is essential, both to encourage participation and to make their professional value explicit. Possible sources include NASA’s Topical Workshops, Symposiums, and Conferences and The Heising-Simons Foundation. 
   
3. Take a chance on an opportunity that interests you, even if you don’t know where it might lead!

Last but not least, a huge thanks to the organizers:

• Robin Bjorkquist, Seattle University
• Beth A. Cunningham, American Association of Physics Teachers
• Jessica Esquivel, FermiLab
• Priscilla Lewis, COACh, University of Oregon
• Stephanie Lyons, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Sherry Yennello, Texas A&M University

And to Kathy McCloud, NSF Program Director, for her support of the workshop. 

AASWomen Newsletter for September 20, 2024

Congressional Gold Modal for Katherine Johnson, item 5.
Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of September 20, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, Hannah Jang-Condell, and Ferah Munshi

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Crosspost: Encieh Erfani brings attention to fellow displaced scholars
2. Women in Astronomy Citizen Science Event
3. 2025 NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School Applications Due November 4, 2024
4. Call for 2025 ExoExplorers and ExoGuides
5. NASA's 'Hidden Figures' awarded Congressional Gold Medals for pioneering space work
6. Disappearing scientists: Attrition and retention patterns of 2.1 million scientists in 38 OECD countries
7. Letters of Intent and proposal deadlines for IAU Symposia in 2026
8. Examining how a documentary film can serve as an intervention to shift attitudes and behaviours around sexism in STEM
9. Decadal Survey Incubation Program
10. Nature Editorial: Why aren’t there talks with the Taliban about getting women and girls back into education?
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.

Crosspost: Encieh Erfani brings attention to fellow displaced scholars

By Rachel Brazil, for Physics Today

The Iranian cosmologist has struggled to find a professional and physical place to call home after she publicly supported the country’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement.

Image Credit: Encieh Erfani (Physics Today)

Everything changed for Iranian cosmologist Encieh Erfani in the fall of 2022. On 16 September, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran following her arrest for allegedly breaching the country’s strict dress code for women. In Mexico at the time for a visiting fellowship, Erfani followed the news as the largest demonstrations in Iran since 2009 ensued. 

A week after Amini’s death, Erfani spoke up in support of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement and resigned from her faculty position at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences in Zanjan. Soon after, she says, her family in Iran received a threatening phone call. Erfani chose to remain in exile, fearing imprisonment if she were to return home.

Notably, she chose not to wear a hijab at conferences or on social media when she was outside Iran. “I knew that my colleagues [in Iran] would see and that I would pay for that,” she says. But, until recently, she “could never imagine that not wearing the hijab could cause you to be killed.”

Read more at

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/43050/Q-A-Encieh-Erfani-brings-attention-to-fellow

AASWomen Newsletter for September 13, 2024

Item 1

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of September 13, 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. Assessing the Demographics of Participants in AAS Press Conferences
2. Researchers with a large network of unique collaborators have longer careers, finds study
3. Discrimination or a Competitive Climate? Why Women Cannot Translate Their Better High School Grades into University Grades
4. Job Opportunities
5. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
6. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
7. 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.

Assessing the Demographics of Participants in AAS Press Conferences

By Elizabeth Fenstermacher

In support of the CSWA’s Strategic Plan for the 2020s, a survey to assess the participation of community members at official AAS press conferences was conducted. In Assessing the Demographics of Participants in Press Conferences at Meetings of the American Astronomical Society (2010-2022), Grace Bagdon, Nicolle Zellner, Patricia Knezek, and the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) examined the demographics of who is invited to participate in press conferences and reported on the participants’ perceptions of the influence that participating in even just one AAS press conference has on one’s career and forward trajectory. 

A few highlights:

Figure 6 in Bagdon et al. (2021).



• 59.7% of respondents felt that participation in press conferences impacted their career in a positive way. Women were more likely than men to feel this way, and those from small academic institutions were significantly more likely to feel this way.

• Around 35% of respondents who identified as women had participated in more than one press conference while over 48% of men could say the same.

• Respondents report that the ‘Dual Anonymous’ method has been shown to increase the participation, and thus the representation, of women.

Figure 22 (left) and Figure 23 (right) in Bagdon et al. (2021).

When asked to provide feedback on the results of this research, longtime AAS Press Officer Rick Fienberg stated,

The most important sentence (in my opinion) is this one from the Recommendations section: ‘This study has…demonstrated that press conference participation is broadly representative of AAS membership and that this participation can positively impact a career.’ That alone should prompt more people to step forward to participate in press conferences.

In response to the reports findings of an overwhelming support for the ‘Dual Anonymous’ method, Rick recommended that ‘Public Information Officers’ (PIOs) at investigator institutions should also be encouraged to utilize a dual anonymous method as well, when selecting what is newsworthy. He offered the following:

...when reaching out to PIOs for recommendations, it’d be worthwhile to encourage them to do the same, i.e., to focus on the abstracts and not the authors when looking for newsworthy results to highlight. I suspect if you were to look at the people who’ve participated in multiple press conferences over the years, you’d find that they are more likely than average to have worked with a PIO. In my experience, PIOs often recommend the same people repeatedly.

Figure 9 in Bagdon et al. (2021).

See more data and read the full report here.

 

AASWomen Newsletter Sept 6, 2024

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of September 6, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, Hannah Jang-Condell, and Ferah Munshi

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Crosspost: Maggie Aderin-Pocock on diversity: 'It's hard to find an argument against it'
2. Women in Astronomy Citizen Science
3. 'She was right and they were wrong'
4. Women and Girls in Astronomy
5. Head count: statistics about women in astronomy
6. Smithsonian National Air and Space Events
7. AfAS
8. Investigating experiences of a Black woman in physics and astronomy
9. Larger teams worsen academic career prospects
10. Brooke Owens Fellowship
11. CHARA proposals
12. 245th AAS meeting call for splinter proposals
13. 2024 Physics and Astronomy Faculty Teaching Institute
14. Deadlines
15. Job Opportunities
16. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
17. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
18. 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.

Crosspost: Maggie Aderin-Pocock on diversity: ‘It’s hard to find an argument against it’

By Audrey Thompson, for Nature

The space scientist and broadcaster describes how she deals with racism,
taps dyslexia’s hidden powers and
inspires disadvantaged students to pursue science careers.

Credit: Steven May/Alamy (nature.com)

Maggie Aderin-Pocock is the most famous Black female scientist in the United Kingdom. She has co-hosted the BBC’s long-running astronomy television programme The Sky at Night since 2014, and earned a BAFTA nomination (from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for her work on the children’s programme Stargazing in 2016.

She studied at Imperial College London, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1990 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1994. She has worked on many space-technology projects, notably on a number of satellites to monitor climate change and on NIRSpec, one of four scientific instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that allow it to survey extremely distant galaxies.

Over the past 20 years, Aderin-Pocock has also focused on science communication, encouraging under-represented groups to enter science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers. So far, she has given talks to more than 500,000 people globally.

Read more at

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02303-x