Diversity Checklist

As we strive to make astronomy a true meritocracy, one challenge is to convince those with power that we still have work to do. If we want to build our community into one that looks more like America, one possible strategy is to convert those with privilege into allies for the cause. But what does one do to convince a potential ally to stop simply lounging on the sidelines? One possible tactic is to provide a budding supporter with some tools to help him/her get up and get in the game.

 

An example of a helpful tool is the Diversity Checklist. I first saw a version of the list in a PowerPoint presentation given by my NSF colleague, Lynnette Marsden, a program officer from the Division of Materials Research. Lynnette and I served together on the NSF Math and Physical Sciences Broadening Participation Working Group.

 

This list is geared specifically toward women, but it could be adopted easily to apply to any other underrepresented group. Here’s the version I now use in my Unconscious Bias talks. I pared the basic list down to fit smugly on a single PowerPoint slide, but for this post, I’ve added some hopefully-helpful notes under each item.

 

1. Do I encourage women to follow their interests in terms of education and career path?

 

Some young women, especially those in underrepresented minority communities, are still channeled by teachers, guidance counselors, and parents on to career tracks that are traditionally female – nurse instead of doctor, teacher instead of professor, or social worker instead of psychiatrist. Many of their role models may also be in these traditional positions. An ally can help counterbalance these powerful social stereotypes by introducing young women to the full spectrum of career choices.

 

2. Do I mentor junior women?

 

A 2014 study revealed that senior male professors in biology, especially those who have prestigious awards or are members of the National Academies, train a significantly smaller percentage of female graduate students and postdocs than their female or junior colleagues. These results sent CSWA’s Ed Bertschinger back to search his own professional history. He blogged about the results in Elite Male Faculty Employ Fewer Women.

　

3. Do I seek advice from senior women?

 

This item on the check list can be more challenging because of the shortage of senior women in physics and astronomy. Why bother to take the extra time to seek out senior women when it is so much easier to find a variety of senior men to talk to, all with their own advice to share? Checking this item off the list can often take a conscious effort, but it is such an important component of becoming a true ally.

 

4. Do I ensure I am fairly assessing all applicants for new positions, promotions, etc.?

 

This is where we all need to be aware of our own unconscious biases. It is so easy to let biases sneak in to an assessment of resumes, job credentials, or proposals. Biases affect fellowship, hiring, and award selection. Promotions and careers can be negatively impacted. Always second guess yourself and your colleagues. Make sure that your decisions are grounded solidly in the data available. For more on unconscious bias, review the eye-opening studies from sociology.

 

5. Do I include women in lunches, gatherings, and technical discussions?

 

Some potential allies might resist this suggestion because they fear that their invitation might be misinterpreted – a date rather than a working lunch, a rendezvous rather than a business meeting, an intimate chat rather than a technical discussion. There are easy ways to eliminate these potential misunderstandings. Send group invitations and always act professionally toward your colleagues. For more advice, check Diversity 101: Nine Simple Steps to a More Diverse Astronomical Community.

 

6. Do I listen to women’s opinions in meetings and do I show support for their ideas?

 

Almost every woman I know has been in this situation: she sitting in a meeting and makes what she thinks is a great suggestion; she’s ignored. Ten minutes later, a guy makes a similar suggestion and everyone thinks it's just the greatest idea. What’s going on? If you find that you are the one doing the ignoring, train yourself to focus when a woman speaks. This take awareness and effort. If you notice others doing this, find a way to redirect attention back to the woman who made the original suggestion. Check out ADVICE: Being Ignored in a Meeting for more suggestions.

 

7. Do I help ensure that our work space and rules accommodate women’s needs?

 

The easiest way to check on this is to ask local women. This part should be obvious, but I’ll state it explicitly anyway – ask in a respectful and professional manner.

 

8. Do I nominate women for awards/recognitions?

 

For a very long time, I know that the answer to this question was no, at least for the AAS Russell and Heinemann Prizes, the awards for senior and mid-career astronomers. I know because for years (and years) no women won these prestigious awards! So I put together a clandestine group of astronomers that I affectionately refer to as the Prize Patrol. We started nominating women for these top awards. We can’t claim every success, but you can take a look at the recent results and judge for yourself. This is just one example of how a small deliberate effort can reap big rewards.

 

9. Do I suggest women as invited speakers, co-organizers, etc.?

 

This is another case where unconscious bias can affect your results. Take a look at CSWA’s data on Percentages of Conference Invited Speakers Who Are Women. Here is some blog advice from an anonymous colleague: (a) if the first 5 names you come up with happen to be male, challenge yourself to write down 5 female names; (b) make sure the final list of invited speakers is representative of the community; and (c) don’t expect only the female colleagues on the committee to suggest female names.

 

10. Do I congratulate women on their successes?

 

This one is easy – just do it!

 

A potential ally might look at this list and check off numbers 1 and 2, but then snag on 3. Another might be proud to admit that he/she and done at least half of these things – once. But the trick to becoming a successful ally is to all these things all the time. When this check list morphs from a crutch, reminding one to do the right thing, to a routine, where these activities become second nature, then an ally has truly been born.

Why So Few? Unconscious Bias II

The 2010 report entitled, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), finds that women continue to experience more overt discrimination, as well as the more unconscious bias, in science and engineering. Research by Dr. Madeline Heilman at New York University shows that women in so-called masculine jobs or nontraditional fields, which includes science and engineering, often find themselves in a double bind.

 

First, women in these “masculine” jobs are often judged to be less competent than their male peers, unless the women are clearly successful in their work. But when a woman is clearly competent in a “male” job or position, she is often judged to be less likable. Because both likability and competence are needed for success in the workplace, women in STEM fields can find themselves in a double bind. Therefore, the implications of these findings are enormous. Being seen as either less competent or less likable can affect relationships with peers, evaluations, and recommendations for promotion and salary increases.

Fix the system, fix the people

Which system, which people? These questions were discussed two weeks ago at a very interesting session ADVANCE Grants: Increasing the Participation of Women in Physics at the summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers.



The NSF ADVANCE program seeks to increase the representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers. Many important contributions have come from major ADVANCE programs around the country, including the STRIDE workshops and materials from the University of Michigan and workshops and materials on Departmental Climate and Breaking the Bias Habit from the the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The AAPT session provided an overview by Program Director Jessie DeAro and summaries of several projects. A major recurring theme was the question of where to focus effort for best effect.

A nice dichotomy was presented by  Sherry Yennello of Texas A&M University in her talk "From ‘Fixing Women’ to ‘Institutional Transformation’: An ADVANCE Case Study". We have a problem to solve: women are underrepresented in STEM and are failing to advance at their capacity. The problem involves both women as a group and the organizational culture of academic science and engineering, i.e., "the system." It is interesting to ask: Are we trying to fix the women, or fix the system? Or is this dichotomy too limited?

Mentoring initiatives are an example of helping women (and all mentees) to improve their chances of success, and are a frequent organizational response to the problem under discussion. The academic system has lots of hidden knowledge to be acquired, and in male-dominated disciplines women can find it harder to acquire this knowledge without special efforts. At least, this is how universities tend to view things. Many universities offer mentoring and career workshops to all, but the motivation sometimes seems to be to "help women and minorities." A similar lens may work for work-life balance, which often is, incorrectly, regarded as a women's issue. And yet women still spend on average much more time in chores and family care than men do, so there is an issue here!

The other talks in the session addressed similar themes, including initiatives to support women in STEM at the Rochester Institute of Technology summarized by Lea Michel, and a peer mentoring network of senior women in physics at small liberal arts colleges described by Anne Cox of  Eckerd College. The talks were great but they leave me with lingering questions and uneasy thoughts: What problem are we trying to solve, and how?

It is easy to focus solutions on people, hence the natural tendency to "fix the people." But which people?

Unconscious bias training such as that pioneered at Michigan and Wisconsin-Madison is another example of "fix the people" -- except that now, in caricature, "the people" are men, especially white men. We all have blind spots, but those exhibited by people in power are the most consequential. So it makes sense to reduce their effects by training the white men (among others).

Sherry Yennello noted another perspective: we could fix the system that women and men operate in so that everyone can succeed to their potential. This involves shifting organizational culture, which is difficult and can take many years. As an interim, continue to assist those who are not fully reaping the benefits of that culture. This seems like a good approach.

Fixing the system is hard because we don't always see it: Lea Michel used the metaphor of a fish in water. It's also hard because people interact with the system and are changed by it more readily than they can change the system.

An example is the great variety of departmental cultures present in a given field or within a given university. The law of large numbers does not seem to equalize climate: two different departments, hiring from the same group of people, can have vastly different traditions, culture, and experience. Person A may thrive in Department B but not in Department C, and this varies greatly with the person and the department.

The NSF ADVANCE program has long recognized this difference. Its Institutional Transformation awards seek "to produce large-scale comprehensive change and serve as a locus for research on gender equity and institutional transformation for academic STEM." The ADVANCE program is in its 15th year. This seems like the right timescale on which to seek institutional transformation.

Maybe the system is what needs fixing, not the people. But the system is widespread, and every new person joining an organization brings their own history of systems. And that brings the final complication: ourselves.

Each of us has work to do. We cannot easily "fix" others, and even less fix a system. But we can fix ourselves. We are all broken in ways, we all needing mending. How much time and effort do we put into that when we think about fixing others or fixing the system?

Social change is hard, harder than physics or astronomy. But those who can start change from within, and then inspire others, can make a tremendous contribution to solving the pressing problems of inequality.

Why So Few? Unconscious Bias I

The 2010 report entitled, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), finds that bias, often unconscious, continues to limit women’s progress in scientific and engineering fields. Research by Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a former AAUW fellow, and her colleagues at Harvard University shows that even individuals who consciously reject negative stereotypes about women in science often still believe that science is better suited to men than women at an unconscious level. These unconscious beliefs or implicit biases may be more powerful than explicitly held beliefs and values simply because we are not aware of them.

Funding diversity efforts

Last year several major tech companies released data revealing their lack of workplace diversity compared with the general population. This year three of the best-known companies have committed substantial funding to increasing the numbers and success of women and underrepresented minorities in their firms and in the industry as a whole. This is a major experiment worth following by the astronomy community. Not only do the tech companies employ many people who started in astronomy, but those of us in academia can learn from what works in an industry facing similar challenges to our own.

Intel is a standout. In January they announced $300M for engineering scholarships and for support historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In June they announced the creation of a $125M venture fund to support startups led by women and minorities. As the Intel Capital VP explained, this is a wise investment: private firms led by women do better than those led by men, yet 98% of venture capital funding goes to firms led by men. These investments are nearly 1% of Intel's total revenue in 2014 ($425M of $55.9B). Although they are not annual investments, Intel aims to make an impact in its own hiring over five years, so let's call it 0.15% of total revenue per year.

While it's not exactly tithing, Intel's investment is still very impressive. In 2014, MIT's revenue was $3.1B. 0.15% of that is $4.7M. If one counts all the student financial aid and faculty startup packages for women and underrepresented minorities, then we exceed that amount. Excluding these items, I'm not sure that we do.

Google is also impressive in its funding and visibility on diversity matters. In May, they committed $150M to diversity, after announcing that they had devoted $115M to diversity initiatives in 2014, which is 0.17% of their 2014 revenue. I've been unable to find any details on their investments, so I give Intel greater credit for their transparency. On the other hand, Google leads the tech industry in unconscious bias training including development of an excellent video and workshops that are being given to most of its workforce. Academia generally lags in such efforts, although the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI) has made impressive strides and offers their workshops to other organizations. Google also permits some of its employees to devote 20% of their time at work to focus on diversity projects.

The other major tech company in the news for diversity funding is Apple, which committed $50M in March to supporting HBCUs and the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). This is an impressive contribution, but is less than 0.03% of Apple's 2014 revenue. Still, by focusing on the STEM pipeline, they have a chance to make big impact.

These efforts are noteworthy and are in the nation's interest, as well as the self-interest of the tech companies. Will other companies and academia step up to the plate?

Hockey or STEM?

The below is a guest post written by Dr. Jo-Anne Brown. Dr. Brown is a radio astronomer and faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, cross-appointed to Natural Sciences, at the University of Calgary. 

Earlier this week I posted a Maclean's article on my FB page about the statistics of women in STEM, particularly in Canada. The article described the exodus of women out of careers in science as “death by a thousand cuts”, and identified a number of areas, including major award recipients, where women were vastly under-represented. One comment I received from a friend (and former student) was, “If 19% of first year [engineering] students are female, and 12% [of professional engineers] are female, that's of course a problem (both the low initial enrolment and the attrition). But if 18% of the [Canadian Science and Engineering] Hall of Famers and 28% of the Canada Research Chairs are women, wouldn't this indicate over-representation based on the percentage of women in STEM? ... How do we reconcile these numbers?”

A recipe for culture change

If you could design your ideal workplace, what would it look like?  If you are reading this blog, chances are that your description includes more than a high salary and state of the art facilities and includes being valued for your ability and treated fairly and respectfully by others.

Recently I served on a visiting committee that privately interviewed every staff and faculty member of an academic department.  If I had to design my ideal workplace, I could not have come up with a more satisfied group.  Everyone loves their job and feels welcomed and respected.  Inclusion, diversity, and excellence are seamlessly interwoven.  My ideal workplace would look a lot like that.

During the past two years I was given the gift of time (about 18 months) to study my university in depth to make recommendations for advancing a respectful and caring community.  The result is a report currently under discussion by faculty, staff, postdocs, students and alumni.  Some of the recommendations, such as universal unconscious bias training, would, I believe, be quite impactful if they spread widely.  That particular recommendation is based on groundbreaking work done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google.

Business guru Peter Drucker is said to have remarked, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."  What he meant is that the unwritten rules of how people interact and what they feel is normal for their organization will make it difficult to implement organizational change unless the tacit assumptions are spoken aloud.

Shifting a culture requires that it first be understood.  Efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion often are hindered by culture.  What if we made culture part of the solution instead of part of the problem?

That is the approach I followed in writing this report.  It's not the usual one.  But isn't that what researchers do?  We experiment and innovate.  When empathy is added to this equation, we have the ingredients for culture change.  Submit your recipes!  And let's use culture to our advantage.

Women of Color in Astronomy and Astrophysics

"Women of Color in Astronomy and Astrophysics" was a joint effort of the AAS Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA) and the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA). It was written by Dara Norman, Jedidah Isler & Hakeem Oluseyi (CSMA) and Nancy Morrison, Caroline Simpson & Laura Trouille (CSWA). It is especially powerful because it describes strategies for overcoming the barriers that have kept the percentages of Women of Color in the sciences so low.

 

This document is part of the 2013 conference entitled, “Seeking Solutions: Maximizing American Talent by Advancing Women of Color in Academia.” It is reprinted here with permission from the National Academy of Sciences, Courtesy of the National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.

 

Introduction

 

Women of color (WoC) are at the intersection of race and gender. While they experience issues that arise for both women and minority groups, they are often overlooked in efforts on behalf of either category, to the detriment of their persistence in academia [1]. The next section of this article enumerates barriers that face WoC in astronomy, starting with those that particularly affect career establishment (early graduate student to postdoctoral) and moving to those that impact later career stages. Later sections describe steps toward solutions to these problems, measures taken by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and lessons learned from academic programs.

 

Gender Parity in NSF Astronomy Research Programs

 

During my first year as a Program Officer in NSF’s Astronomy Division, I was able to compile data on the success rates of different opportunities in the Individual Investigator Programs. As chair of CSWA, one of my top priorities was to look for gender differences.

 

The results* for Astronomy are summarized in the table. The top line is for the Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Grants (AAG), our main grant program. PIs are mainly (but not exclusively) senior and mid-career scientists. There is both good news and bad news here. The good news is that the percentage of female awards (19 +/- 2%) is equal to the percentage of females in the pool (19 +/- 1%). The bad news is that the percentage of women in astronomy at the senior and mid-career levels is still so low. The next line in the table is for Faculty Early Career Development, the CAREER program, which generally makes less than 10 awards per year. The following line is for the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships (AAPF), which currently makes 9 awards per year. Although the numbers are smaller and the uncertainties are larger, the results for both of these programs agree with those of the AAG. If we do weighted averages of all three programs, we again find that the percentage of female awards (22 +/- 2%) is equal to the percentage of females in the pool (22 +/- 1%).

One Man's Perspective on Diversity and Inequality in Science

Today's Guest Post is by Ramin Skibba is a research scientist at the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He blogs about astronomy news and science policy issues at http://raminskibba.net.

It's obvious, but one thing I've noticed over my career so far is that many departments, institutions, conferences, organizations, committees, high-profile publications, big research grants, etc., both nationally and internationally, and especially leadership positions, are filled with straight, white, men. There are notable and impressive exceptions, but the trend is clear. The distributions of people in the scientific workforce clearly don't reflect their distribution in the overall population. For example, according to the AAS's Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, nearly half of undergraduate students who obtain bachelors of science degrees are women, but only a third of astronomy graduate students and 30% of Ph.D. recipients are. Women compose 25-30% of postdocs and lower-level faculty, and this drops by half (to 15%) of tenured faculty. This is not explained by historical differences in gender: if women were promoted and retained at rates comparable to men, then the fractions advancing to higher career stages should be equal. The demographics in terms of race aren't good either: according to the American Institute of Physics, African Americans and Hispanics combined account for only 5% of physics faculty.

Of course, this isn't news to readers of this blog. And the disturbing lack of diversity doesn't just affect us in astronomy and astrophysics or even just in the physical sciences. For example, as you've probably seen, the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley has deservedly been in the news lately. Tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have all been criticized for being dominated by white men (and recently, also Asian men). We definitely need to work more at improving diversity in all STEM fields. 

Blinded by my privilege

A large, visible knapsack.
htleather.com

This is a repost of an essay from my personal blog, Mahalo.ne.Trash. where it has received 4400+ page views. Clearly it resonated. The topic of privilege has come up here quite a bit in the last year. A good definition from the AMSA (.docx) is as follows: "Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels and gives advantages, favors, and benefits to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups." See also this link. Keys to privilege include a power differential between an ingroup and an outgroup. In astronomy, this typically means white, straight, male holding privilege over white women, women and men of color and thos in the LGBT* communities. Another key is that privilege is often hidden from those who have it, and extremely obvious to those who lack it. Imagine a billionaire talking about how money and possessions don't matter to him and his family. 

I was recently talking with a female astronomer about diversity in astronomy. At one point, she said, "You don't know what it's like to be marginalized in your dept., to not have people listen to you and talk over you. To not give you the benefit of the doubt." Now, keep in mind that my conversation partner is white. I was a bit taken aback by her comment, and I blurted out, "You think I don't understand?! I am a Black man in America. At Harvard. In astronomy. There are of order 10 other Black people at my station in life. Until only recently I was rarely given the benefit of the doubt! I understand marginalization."

I could tell that she was, in turn, taken aback. I think that in her view I was just another man enjoying all of the associated privileges of being male in astronomy. To be sure, I do enjoy many membership benefits. I can look around the room in faculty meetings and see other men. Lot's of 'em. But it was obvious to me that she overlooked a major detail: even though I'm a man, I am far more of a minority in any astronomy gathering than she is. Not that it's a competition. I'd honestly rather lose the who's-more-of-a-minority contest. 

However, before I was able to feel too self-satisfied, I recalled a time when I did forget about my membership benefits. Indeed, I was totally ignorant of my privilege, to the detriment of people I was trying to help. 

Your Unconscious Gender Bias Could Kill You

Today’s guest blogger is Stella Offner. She is a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.
 

If you’ve been a long-time (or even recent reader) of AAS Women, you will be familiar with the many perils of unconscious bias (1). You will be aware that unconscious bias related to gender can result in unintended discrepancies in women’s salary, citation count, award recognition, funding, mentoring opportunities, and of course, flat-out discrimination.  All these things are bad for women generally and for equality in science, specifically. Just in case you are still not convinced that gender bias is not a big deal and doesn’t apply to you, did you also know that your unconscious gender bias could kill you? Seriously.

Stop Interrupting Me: Gender, Conversation Dominance, and Listener Bias

I've lost track of the number of times I've experienced the following scenarios:

1) During a heated discussion―speaking clearly and out loud―I say something that no one appears to hear. A man repeats it minutes, maybe seconds later, to accolades and group discussion.

2) I am participating in a group interview of a candidate. When he answers questions he looks directly at the men in the room, but never or rarely looks at me―even when I was the one to ask the question.  He asks questions of the men only―even questions which I am clearly the most appropriate person to address.

3) I am at a party. The topic of physics (or cosmology, or data science) comes up.  A male I have just met proceeds to explain to me a New York Times article he has read on the subject. I mention that I have my PhD and I'm an expert on the topic. Instead of using this as an opportunity to ask me questions and learn from me, he continues talk about what he knows. Bonus points: He turns to my boyfriend―who isn't a physicist or a data scientist―and asks him questions about the topic.

4) I am part of a male-dominated discussion.  I keep trying to participate but repeatedly get interrupted and talked-over.  The only way to be heard is to interrupt back, talk-over people myself, or call out the behavior and ask people to let me finish.  All of these feel overly aggressive and makes me uncomfortable, so I end up remaining silent, not contributing to the discussion.

Why We Resist Unconscious Bias

By Meg Urry, Yale University, Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy. Reproduced from the January 2014 Issue of STATUS: A Report on Women in Astronomy

About ten years ago, I sat down at my computer to take the Implicit Association Test devised by Mahzarin Banaji, then my colleague at Yale University, now at Harvard University. I had just read a story in The New York Times about how she and her colleagues test reaction times for paired words and images, calibrating the experimental subject (in this case, me) on innocuous images, while we type “yes” or “no” to indicate whether the word belongs with the image. For example, you would type “yes” for a flower paired with the word “beautiful,” and “no” for an iceberg and the word “hot.”

Guest Post: Time to talk about Privilege

We have another guest post today from Caitlin Casey, a McCue Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine who studies galaxy formation and evolution, including discovering and characterizing diverse types of starburst galaxies and how they relate to more "normal" spiral galaxies in the early Universe.  Caitlin recently cowrote, along with Kartik Sheth, a NatureJobs article entitled The Ethical Gray Zone, based on an extensive community poll on ethics and diversity.  She is also involved in STEM outreach and mentoring within her department and throughout astronomy.

After reading this pretty excellent article on Slate about how to 'look the part' of computer genius (long story short, being an Asian male is pretty helpful), I thought a lot about how the notion of privilege affects STEM research.  Privilege itself is a term that carries a lot of stigma and even vile hatred for some, as if there's an implied prejudice or blame that comes with it. Many folks aren't comfortable with the idea that they have special rights or advantages (or even immunities) based on their physical appearance or life choices, and that these advantages pervade all aspects of life: even, *gasp* their research and work environment.

Do you know what benefits this card carries?

Whenever I point friends or vague internet acquaintances to Peggy McIntosh's white privilege essay or similar compilations for other group privileges (e.g.  for male privilege, female privilege, class privilege, physical ability privilege, religious privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc.)  someone usually pipes up and shouts "prejudice!" or sometimes "stereotype!"  They then argue that discussing privileges provides re-enforcement and makes stereotypes even more harmful.

Faculty Search Committee II

Last month’s post on Unconscious Bias focused on the formation and initial job of the faculty search committee. Once the applications are in, however, the committee’s job continues. What typically happens next? (1) search committee picks the ‘best’ candidates; (2) applications sit in a file drawer in chair’s office; (3) faculty are invited to browse through the files; (4) ‘best’ candidates are then invited to campus. This is the easiest, least painful way to go through this process. Efforts may be made to avoid conscious bias and prejudice, but opportunities abound for unconscious bias to dominate the selection.

Values Affirmation and You: What You Deeply Care About Affects Your Ability to Do Science (Now Featuring Peer Review!)

Today I am sharing a guest post from Dr. Sarah Ballard. Dr. Ballard completed her PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Harvard University in 2012 and is now a NASA Sagan fellow at the University of Washington.

It was only several years into graduate school that I learned that language already existed to describe my academic experience in science. I’m an unusual astronomer in some ways, having arrived in the field only after devoting my early undergraduate studies to Peace and Conflict Studies and Gender Studies. I was inculcated in the early years of college with language that describes the human experience. I was literally tested on phrases such as “intersectionality of oppression” and “safe space.” Value is assigned in these disciplines, in the form of grades, to a student’s ability to articulate ideas of bias and privilege. I wrote essays in exam rooms, after poring over assigned articles, on how wrongs get righted within human group dynamics. I thought and wrote about the activities people undertake to restore feelings of dignity and agency to underserved groups: this was once my major. 

Let me describe to you here why this is relevant to you, an astrophysicist. Let me describe a way that you can leverage the knowledge other fields accrue about imperfect human functioning under high pressure. Let me make the argument to you that reflection on self-worth can alleviate distress and underperformance in yourself, your colleagues, your mentees.

Faculty Search Committee

What can we do about unconscious bias? First, we have to be aware that it exists. Then we need to establish policies and put them into practice. Finally, there needs to be accountability. We can illustrate this process with an example: A Faculty Search Committee. How do we typically start a job search for a new faculty member? There are several standard steps: (1) the department chair forms a search committee; (2) the committee writes an ad targeting a specific sub-discipline; (3) the position is advertised; and (4) the committee members go about their business until the applications begin to pour in.

Perhaps You Should Consider Wearing Racier Clothing

This video, by Emily Graslie of The Brain Scoop, has been making the internet rounds this week.

 

Emily does a good job of summarizing some of the reasons why it's hard to find women role models in science. A lot of it boils down to the fact that women frequently get judged based solely on appearances, and that the feedback we got often has more to do with how "hot" or "sexy" we are rather than the content of our work.

Sponsorship: the New Hammer to Crack the Glass Ceiling

My recent posts on Unconscious Bias include a personal story, the legacy of patriarchy, schemas, and studies from sociology. You can probably tell that it is a subject that interests me greatly. Therefore, I was delighted to find an article in Sunday’s Washington Post that sheds new light on our biases as well as the importance of “Sponsorships,” which are different from “Mentorships” in ways that are vital to promotion and success. The article is:

Chair of major law firm champions ‘sponsorship’ of women and minorities

By Brigid Schulte

Kent Gardiner, chairman of the law firm Crowell & Moring, sat down to talk about why his firm is partnering with economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Center for Talent Innovation to promote sponsorship of women and minorities in the workplace, how sponsoring is different and why it matters.

Q: Why were you interested in starting a sponsorship program? Women have been graduating from college in greater numbers than men since 1985. Women make up nearly half of all law school students. Aren’t we “there” yet?