Why We Leave

Reaching to the stars
by Ares Nguyen via flickr

The charge of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy is to recommend to the AAS Board of Trustees practical measures that the AAS can take to improve the status of women in astronomy and encourage their entry into this field. We define women to include people who identify as female, including trans women, genderqueer women, and non-binary people who are significantly female-identified. As an organization, the AAS supports and promotes increased participation of historically underrepresented groups in astronomy.

The CSWA has existed for almost 42 years. In that time we have seen a growth in women in the field (although the number of men has also increased alongside this). The linked AIP report found that there was no significant attrition of women between career stages in astronomy. However, attrition does occur for people of all identities, especially those who are underrepresented. We all know someone who left the field at some point.

Cross-post: Extend the Tenure Clock to Save Careers of Rising Academic Women

By Karen Bjorkman

The halls of higher education already had a leaky pipeline for women in science and academia, but the coronavirus pandemic has taken an ax to the problem and busted it wide open.

Working moms across the country have reached a breaking point – a shocking 617,000 women quit the workforce in September alone.

In colleges and universities, as in other workplaces, we are on the cusp of what has been called a female recession after professional careers and parental duties merged during COVID-19 lockdowns and homeschooling.

Women are falling behind on research – derailing critical progress on achieving tenure and promotion within the seven-year deadline – especially in three main research areas: health and medicine, physical sciences and engineering, and social science and economics.

Before the damage to diversity is beyond repair, institutions must act immediately to provide flexibility for rising academic women who are facing career-ending setbacks.

At The University of Toledo, we are offering a one-year tenure clock extension to all junior faculty no matter what year they are in their tenure process. It’s the right thing to do. While not specifically aimed at women, we know that women are largely experiencing the brunt of childcare and caregiving for aging parents.

Read the rest of the article at

https://diverseeducation.com/article/197733/

When The Two-Body With Children Problem Turns Into The Divorced-With-Children Many-Body Problem

Artist's concept that illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Much has been written about navigating the two-body problem in academia. Any field where it is typical to assume that people will be able to move across countries and continents every 2-3 years until their mid-30s is an impediment to long term relationships. This is compounded by the fact that many astronomers have relationships with other academics, who are commonly other astronomers, and so navigating two people who need to do that can become very difficult.

Sometimes relationships don't work out—so it is also important to talk about that. In particular, what happens when pairs of astronomers have children and are then expected to move for their careers, while no longer being in a relationship with the other parent? I certainly don't have definitive answers to this question, but I do have personal experience which I will share as an example of how it can work.

Guest Post: Working to Level the Playing Field at NASA

By Joan Schmelz
NASA Postdoctoral Program Director
Universities Space Research Association (USRA)

A recently approved policy now allows NASA postdoctoral fellows the opportunity to continue receiving stipends during time away from work. This time away can be for a variety of family and medical issues, including a serious health condition, birth or adoption of a child, parental care, or other special circumstances. This is a major improvement over the old procedure, where stipends stopped while the fellows were absent from their posts.

I have been working to get this policy in place since I became the Director of the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) back in February 2019. Friends – alums of the program – shared their stories of how they tried to navigate the old system. Under the previous policy, the amount of time away from work needed to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. The burden was on the fellow, who was dependent on the goodwill of their NASA research advisor. This burden has finally been lifted with a new twelve-week guarantee.

I think of this as a policy for the 21st century. I’ve described it as ‘one giant leap’ for work-life balance at NASA. If you want to level the playing field, this is where you start.

Parental leave policies 2.0

The US remains the only developed country that has no national policy or law providing for paid parental leave. As a result, a plethora of different policies are utilized by employers and organizations. Several years ago the CSWA began a useful list of parental leave policies at astronomical institutions. Readers unfamiliar with this will find it interesting to compare their institution with others.

The vast array of different policies offers an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of different leave policies. Which policies promote employee well being and success? Which are the best for recruiting, retaining, and advancement of all workers? Which policies do employees most like? Do policies exacerbate or ameliorate inequality?

These questions are investigated by social scientists. Recently I've been reading some of the literature, motivated by two considerations.

The first is the periodic assessment of my own university's policies for paid parental leave and, for faculty, tenure clock extensions. The policies were enacted about 15 years ago in order to remove barriers to the success of women faculty, and were explicitly gendered. For example, we grant one-year tenure clock extensions automatically to birth mothers but others must request the extension. Is this fair? Is it effective? It is certainly effective for many individuals, but is it the most effective for everyone?

The second factor is an important new law in Massachusetts, a significant revision of the Massachusetts Maternity Leave Act. The new parental leave law enhances the US Family Medical and Leave Act by requiring 8 weeks of parental leave for all employees, regardless of gender, for the adoption or birth of a child. Crucially, the law states that an "employee on parental leave for the adoption of a child shall be entitled to the same benefits offered by an employee on parental leave for the birth of a child." It has been described by some as a paternity leave law.

Gender dynamics is no longer binary. Gender-neutral parental leave laws and employer policies are important for protecting the rights and supporting the success of LGBT parents including those who adopt. Considerations of LGBT equality were not part of the calculus when our policies were implemented more than 15 years ago, but they are important now.

Sociologists study leave policies and their effect on organizations. Sara Mitchell has compiled a listing of faculty parental leave policies. Erin Cech and Mary Blair-Loy have studied "flexibility stigma" among academic scientists and engineers, which they define as the devaluation of workers who seek or are presumed to need flexible work arrangements.They note that the stigma applies to men and women, and that all suffer the consequences. Avoidance of this stigma is one of the reasons many universities have adopted gender-neutral parental leave laws. On the other hand, some have argued that policies favoring women are necessary because men will use parental leave to further their research careers instead of for childcare. Researchers Jennifer Lundquist, Joya Misra and KerryAnn O'Meara find otherwise. They provide excellent guidance in a recent article in Inside Higher Ed and emphasize the need to destigmatize leave-taking as mommy's work. They provide excellent summary advice for any, like me, who are looking at their university parental leave policies:

"Cultural change recognizing the need for ... work-family balance policies is crucial. Faculty members should be made aware of and encouraged to use available work-life policies in order to promote a culture of use. Strong support from the administration in favor of balanced lives has important multiplying effects on campuses. Departmental chairs can set cultural standards by holding important meetings during school hours and scheduling teaching slots during school hours for parents of children. Part of changing the culture is also publicizing best practices. Administrators should publicly recognize departments with a good track record of benefit usage and supports." -- Lundquist, Misra and O'Meara.

Returning to the questions I posed at the outset, we have few answers. We know that stigmatization is associated with social class and identity, and that parental leave policies reduce stress of those using the policies, at least the stress around parenting. (Eldercare and other family and medical needs also cause stress and loss of productivity, and are not always given as much attention as childbirth and childcare.) I have not seen a study showing the effectiveness of leave policies in terms of recruitment, retention and advancement of employees. Perhaps an informed reader will help!

Midterm Exam for Faculty Members

Astronomy 501: Departmental Methods for Faculty (Fall Semester)

Mid-term Exam.

You have 50 minutes. Answer all questions. Show your work to maximize partial credit.

Question 1: You are a faculty member in top US astronomy department and serving on a search committee for an assistant professor. Which of the two candidates below gets your vote for the job?

Candidate A is a father who has 10 first author papers and has appeared frequently at international conferences to give invited reviews. He completed his PhD 2 years ago.

Candidate B is a mother who has 8 first author papers and currently travels only rarely to give talks. She completed her PhD 3 years ago.

Explain your decision using the standard metrics of academic success, and present a compelling case for your candidate.

Bonus: Imagine you are an untenured professor and a woman. Explain how your decision about which arguments you present to your senior colleagues on the committee is unaffected by your gender and junior status.

The Family Friendly Faculty Retreat

Future faculty scheming how they will run their retreats.

Does your department or research group undertake an annual retreat? If so, is it family friendly?

Retreats offer the chance to break from the routines and confines of day-to-day work to gather as a group to consider the Big Questions facing an institution. In my view, an essential part of an effective retreat is that it be away from the office, and that it span at least one overnight.

I know of several physical science departments for which the "retreat" consists of a full-day meeting at their workplace. But I worry that in the temporal and physical space that houses our day-to-day work, it is all-too-easy to fall back on day-to-day thinking. The goals of the retreat is much more grand: First, we seek to build community. Second, we seek to engage in blue-sky thinking and fresh approaches aimed at tackling the Big Questions! An overnight also means meals together, and it is over meals that I have experienced the most thought provoking conversations, and the opportunity to really check-in with colleagues.

However, (overnight) + (away from office) puts a retreat on a collision course with that sacred family-work balance that we seek. I have written previously about the excellent evidence that concerns about family-work balance adversely affect the retention of women in the sciences. So, isn't the idea of a retreat inherently problematic? Perhaps not, if the families are invited!

Future Directions in the Work-Family Equation

An NPR blog by Maanvi Singh introduced me to an interesting article about gender equality in the workplace and home.  It is by David Pedulla and Sarah Thébaud, faculty members at UT Austin and UC Santa Barbara, respectively.  The article is titled "Can We Finish the Revolution?  Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint" and published this year in the American Sociological Review.

The authors performed a survey to address the question of how much gender-specific workplace cultures and policies determine the roles that men and women play in their households.  Even when couples have gender-equality ideals, workplace constraints may force them to adopt traditional roles of men as the earner and women as the caregiver.  The motivation for the study is to understand why the gender revolution has "stalled".  More women are in the workforce, but are still highly underrepresented tin top positions.   Examples given are that women make up only 4% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 3% of members of Congress.

The study was of young unmarried women and men aged 18 to 32.  The participants were asked their preference for traditional roles (man - primary earner, woman - primary caregiver) vs egalitarian roles.  They were asked to choose between these options under the two assumptions of unsupportive and supportive workplace policies for dual-earner, dual-caregiver arrangements.  One of the primary results is shown in the table here that I made from the data presented.

Postdoc Parenting Work-Life Balance

There's a koan in academia for when is the best time to have a kid:

No time is the right time, all times are equally good (bad?)

My husband is also a postdoc. We have a 9 month old. This is a glass half full kind of post, about how we've taken advantage of the flexible hours, the autonomy, and a few supportive policies to pursue parenting and work on our own(-ish) terms. 

The short of it is that at least one of us was home with our daughter full time until she turned 4 months old and at least one of us continues to be home with her four days a week. Here's how we do it:

President Obama: Childcare is a Must-Have

Left: President Obama in the middle of saying the word childcare, a word which would be greeted by a standing ovation, and which he would say a total of 7 times during his speech.  Right: Government taking an active role in subsidizing childcare in America is currently out-of-fashion, but it isn't a new idea.

I married into a family of State-of-the-Union watchers, and I have embraced the tradition of watching the address live. Yesterday, we managed to get the kids (mostly) in bed and (mostly) asleep by the 9pm start, and so my wife and I snuggled up to hear what the President had to say. 

Over the past decade, these addresses have been peppered with words like "terrorist", "war", "recession", and "unemployment". Then, just about 14 minutes in, I heard a different word: "childcare".

"Wait, what?" said Margaret. "Is this really happening?"

Then, yes, it happened. President Obama told us that childcare is a national economic priority:

Queer Eye for the Straight Marriage

The Women in Astronomy blog is committed to representing diverse perspectives on women in astronomy.  The below post is a response from the AAS Committee on the Status for Women in Astronomy (CSWA) reaching out to AAS Working Group for LGBTIQ Equality (WGLE) for guest contributions, specifically contributions from the LBGQTI perspective.  If you are interested in contributing a guest post to this blog, please contact Jessica Kirkpatrick. 

Today's guest post is by Dr. Jane Rigby. Jane Rigby is an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a contributor to Astrobetter, and a member of the AAS’s Working Group for LGBTIQ Equality (WGLE).

The other day after work, my wife and I were sprawled on the playroom floor, watching our toddler run in circles. I picked a strewn section of the paper and scanned this article.

Confused, I read it more carefully. Was this news? I could have titled the article “Man gets chores, work done”? Why was it leading the local section? To me, the most interesting facet of the article was that the attorney had deliberately chosen a lower-paying job with reasonable hours and a short commute. The rest -- “He cooks! He does laundry!” seemed so quotidian. I was boiling water for pasta, and planned to do laundry after the kid’s bedtime. Is it still newsworthy to profile a straight couple that shares household duties?

Study Shows Few Male Scientists are Involved Dads

Reproduced from this Washington Post article by Brigid Schulte

For years, people have been puzzling over why there are so few women in science, technology, engineering and math, and why the university professors who teach the subjects are predominantly men.

Is it genetics? Preference? Caregiving responsibilities? An unwelcoming environment?

Turns out, according to a new study released Thursday on men in academic science, it may have a lot to do with the boss.

The majority of tenured full professors at some of the most prestigious universities in the country, who have the most power to hire and fire and set the workplace expectation of long hours, are men who have either a full-time spouse at home who handles all caregiving and home duties, or a spouse with a part-time or secondary career who takes primary responsibility for the home.

Celebrate Labor Day by Fixing Your Email Problem

I will honor Labor Day 2014 by fixing a longstanding cancer in my life: My smartphone is hereafter going to have an circumscribed role in my time and mind.

In many ways, my smartphone has been a great help with work-life balance. It has allowed much more flexible work hours: If I need to leave work early because my child is sick at school, or to run a family errand, I can still login to release that grant proposal by the 5pm deadline. And as an observational astronomer, there will always be odd hours when I need to be available to answer questions that are emerging while a collaborator is at the telescope. When on business travel, it helps me keep the day-to-day administrative work of research and grant related questions rolling along while I am sitting at the airport.

But then I catch myself checking email first thing in the morning while I am still in bed. Or checking it while cooking dinner for my family. Or checking it while helping my daughter with homework.

Guest post: AAS Dinners to Discuss Dual-Career Couples

Today I am sharing a guest post by P. R. McCullough. Dr. McCullough received a PhD in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley in 1993, then moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign first on a Hubble fellowship, then becoming an assistant professor. Dr. McCullough moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD in 2002 and is an associate astronomer there.

How many times have you read, "We seek a highly motivated and qualified individual ... "?

Young's double slit experiment, Cooper pairs, quantum entanglement, these and other phenomena are understood not by treating the associated individuals independently, but by acknowledging their duality. For Young's double-slit experiment, by considering the light passing through one slit or the other slit individually, you will get the wrong answer, every time, regardless of your own good intentions, your institution's policies, and even society's human-made laws.

I am sorry this blog post is late

I am sorry this blog post is late. I meant to post it Monday. Yes, the blog is important! But I think my daughter might have lice and I had to deal with that urgently.

I am sorry I can't accept the invitation to speak at the conference. Yes, I do want the meeting to be a success.  But we have four children and the family simply doesn't do well when I am away.

I am sorry that I can't write a letter in support of the promotion. Yes, the candidate is doing great work, and I feel terrible that I can't add my enthusiastic support to assist this junior person. But I get 25 such requests a year, and my weekends are full with math homework, hockey, and girl scouts.

I am sorry I had to leave your colloquium ten minutes before the end. I hope you didn't think I am a jerk for getting up from the front row just as you were about to show the unpublished work. But our day care closes at 5:30pm and it is across town.

I am sorry I can't join the university committee that meets over breakfast at 8am. Yes, I do think we need to rejuvenate our undergraduate curriculum. But I walk my kids to school at 8am, and it is the best part of my day.

I am sorry I am slow to get you comments on your paper. I feel awful that I am delaying the progress at this critical time in your career. I keep thinking I will get to it in the evening after the kids are asleep, but I also need to make time to talk to my wife.

These are all, more or less, true items for which I have apologized recently. Of course, as many of you with kids can anticipate, when I wrote these apologies I left off the last sentence.

Postdoc-hood & Infertility: Part 2

Guest Post: the below post was submitted anonymously by an astronomy post-doc.

A few weeks ago I posted about my husband and my quest for fertility. The emails and conversations I’ve had since have been heart-warming. It’s so helpful to hear other people’s stories; those who have happily come out the other side, those who have adopted, and those who are in the thick of it now. It’s also been further confirmation that there are a lot of women and men in STEM juggling infertility issues and career uncertainties. My best wishes goes out to all of you.

In the most general sense, this experience has been a good reminder of the obvious – people present a certain version of themselves at work, but who knows what kinds of obstacles and hardships they’re dealing with outside of work. Remembering this has made me more empathetic in my workplace interactions, treating people with extra gentleness and give.

Postdoc-hood & Infertility

Guest Post: the below post was submitted anonymously by an astronomy post-doc.

My husband and I have been actively trying to conceive for over a year and a half and working with a fertility specialist for over a year. We’re both postdocs in STEM. I’m in astronomy.

As a postdoc, I know I’m not alone in feeling a lack of control over ‘the next step’ in my career. Having another important piece of my life feeling as though it’s outside of my control has at times been too much. It’s particularly hard at the beginning of each new cycle. I’m a naturally optimistic person, and so each month I get excited about the possibility, and then when it doesn’t happen, I’m still learning how to cope with the loss.  

I’m extremely grateful for the flexibility that comes with being a postdoc. Because of this, I’ve been able to arrive late or leave early for the multiple appointments each month (1x during the first week of the cycle, 1-3x mid cycle, and 1-2x at the end of the cycle). I’ve also been thankful that I can choose whether to travel or not for research. Although I love to travel, we saw early on that, even if I don’t feel stressed while traveling, it has a significant impact on the length of my cycle, when I ovulate, etc. But I do worry about the impact this has had on my research and forward progress in this career.

I’m still finding the right balance, for me, of how much emotional and mental energy to give to our fertility quest. We know we’ll be parents, whether through treatment or through adoption, so sometimes I am able to legitimately take a longer timescale view of the process and gain comfort in that. But other times it’s just really hard.

Dear Postdoc Colleague: Yes, the NSF is Serious About Career-Life Balance

The NSF just released a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) announcing a very interesting initiative for postdocs: In short, principal investigators of NSF grants can submit a request for supplemental funding to cover salary support for additional personnel to sustain research while the postdoc is on family leave.

The DCL is part of the larger NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative. Note the straightforward logic by which the NSF arrives at the necessity of such programs: (1) The NSF must develop the strongest possible STEM talent pool. (2) Women are pursuing advanced study in STEM fields, but they are not advancing proportionally to senior ranks in academe.  (3) There is a clear research from longitudinal data showing that the formation of family is the single greatest factor that accounts for the departure of women from the pipeline between the receipt of the PhD and achieving the rank of tenured professor. THEREFORE, the NSF must foster family-friendly policies if it is to retain more women and thus keep the STEM talent pool as strong as possible. (I highly recommend this short video in which Prof. Mary Ann Mason explains her study; the link above will take you to the full written report.)

Talk, as they say, is cheap. So, what is noteworthy here is that there is real money on offer, which indicates that the NSF really means to take on this problem. So, how much money is the NSF setting aside for this? The DCL offers 3 months of salary support, for a maximum amount of salary of $12,000. Importantly, benefits and overhead can be on top of this. At Harvard these rates are 28% and 69%, respectively, and so the real cost would be just shy of $26,000.  The program appears to be NSF-wide, and so potentially this will add up to a significant total.

The Pregnant Astronomer: Part 1

This week's guest blogger is Kate Follette. Kate is a graduate student at Steward Observatory and an adjunct instructor at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona. Her scientific research focuses on planet formation in circumstellar disks, and she is also engaged in educational research on mitigating quantitative illiteracy through introductory science courses for non-majors.

This is the first in a series of three posts that I’ll be writing about pregnancy, and this one will be focused on tips and tricks for the first half (weeks 1-20 or so) of the 9 month journey to motherhood. Women have a huge diversity of pregnancy experiences and I cannot speak for everyone, so I’ve called on some colleagues to contribute to the “Tips and Tricks” section at the end of the article. If nothing else, I encourage you to scroll to the bottom of this article and soak in some of their wisdom. Whether you’re a man or a woman, have children, will have children, or intend not to, I think there’s something to be learned for everyone in there.

There are literally millions of forums, blogs and books out there about the general pregnancy experience, but when I became pregnant I found myself overwhelmed with questions to which these blogs didn’t have the answers – When and how do I tell my advisor? Should I cancel my observing run? What’s it like being at conferences when pregnant? Will it affect my job prospects (consciously or unconsciously)?

ADVICE: When to Raise a Family

CSWA convened a panel at the January 2008 AAS meeting in Austin where astronomers at various stages in their careers described the way in which they made their decisions about when to raise a family and how their choices have had an impact on their careers. The panel was organized by then CSWA Chair, Geoff Clayton (Louisiana State University). Panel members were: Hannah Jang-Condell (University of Maryland & GSFC), Margaret Hanson (University of Cincinnati), Orsola De Marco (American Museum of Natural History), Charles Liu (CUNY) and John Debes (DTM).

One of the most difficult decisions facing professional women is whether to have children and, if so, when. In practice women in astronomy have chosen a variety of solutions, ranging from delaying or interrupting graduate school or postdoctoral fellowships, delaying child rearing until after tenure, or even abandoning the idea of having children. These decisions usually have a considerable impact on the career path of a professional woman. The following points summarize the views of the panelists and members of the audience: When is the best time to have kids?

1. All times are equally good, meaning that you need to have kids when the time is right for you. Women cannot always count on waiting until 'the time is right' to get pregnant. Nature doesn't always oblige on a schedule and if you wait too long into your late 30's or early 40's, it may be too late.

2. If you have a choice in the matter, then having kids during grad school might have the least impact on your career because it is easier to take some time off. When you are a postdoc you are usually on a two-year clock and when you are tenure track, you usually on a five-year clock.