AASWomen Newsletter for February 14, 2020

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of February 14, 2020
eds: JoEllen McBride, Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, and Alessandra Aloisi

Mary Somerville, from Item 2
(Image credit: FLICKR/CatherineCronin)

This week's issues:

1. Meet your CSWA, JoEllen McBride

2. The Three Marys: The women who unlocked Earth, space and life

3. Seven female scientists you may not have heard of - but should know about

4. Symposium on Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in STEMM

5. Every Day Should Be International Day Of Women And Girls In Science

6. These 10 Women Are Changing the Way We Talk About Science

7. Gendered Cheese: Don't Fall For Women In STEM Neuro-Nonsense

8. A Controversial Study Claimed To Explain Why Women Don’t Go Into Science And Tech. It Just Got A 1,113-Word Correction.

9. Green Bank Observatory Fellowships and Grants

10. Job Opportunities

11. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

AASWomen Newsletter for January 11, 2019

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of January 11, 2019
eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Cristina Thomas, Maria Patterson, and JoEllen McBride

This week's issues:

1. Examining author gender data

2. NASEM Symposium on Women in STEMM

3. Making Waves: 6 Women in Hawaii with Careers in STEM Share Their Stories

4. The Ultimate Women in Science Reading List

5. The US is much less inclusive than it was two years ago. Here's why

6. New measure of equality reveals a fuller picture of male well-being

7. Geena Davis Knows Women Are Good for Hollywood's Bottom Line. So What Gives?

8. When It Comes To Women In STEM Roles, The Results Are Golden

9. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

11. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

AASWomen Newsletter for December 14, 2018

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of December 14, 2018
eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Cristina Thomas, Maria Patterson, and JoEllen McBride, guest ed. Alessandra Aloisi

This week's issues:

1. The First Lady Astronaut Trainees: Time for a Congressional Gold Medal

2. This Brilliant Woman Could Have Won a Physics Nobel for India. Yet Few Indians Know Her Story.

3. Introducing the 2019 Franklin Institute Awards Laureates

4. Sexual Misconduct Allegations against Neil deGrasse Tyson Reveal the Complexity of Academic Inequality

5. Ethnic minority academics earn less than white colleagues

6. It's Unscientific To Credit 'Inherent Differences' For Underrepresentation In Science

7. Rise of the Science Ph.D. Dropout

8. Gender Diversity Is Urgently Needed Say Prominent Women In Technology

9. World's Top 50 Women In Tech 2018

10. Job Opportunities

11. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Stemming the Leak

By Fran Bagenal (University of Colorado, Boulder)

How come I hadn’t noticed these facts before? I thought I was pretty much aware of the demographics of women in physics, but the plot below distributed by the American Institute of Physics last spring had me flabbergasted. What has been going on for the past 15 years that has caused the percentage of US bachelors in physics going to women to drop from nearly 24% down below 20%?

The good news is that absolute number of women getting physics degrees (both bachelors and PhDs) are at record values. And the total number of physics degrees, after oscillating around 4000 for the past 50 years, has shot up to 8000/year. Indeed, talking to physics departments around the country I hear reports of bulging enrollments and needs for moving to larger classrooms.

So why is this expansion preferentially male rather than female? Why are men flocking to physics at a proportionally greater rate than women? I fi
nd it very hard to believe that the market for women physicists is saturated and that out of the whole US population only 1550 young women want to study physics.

Techies

Techies project by Helena Price

Techies is a portrait and interview project by Helena Price that focuses on sharing stories of people who tend to be underrepresented in the greater tech narrative. The project has two main goals: to show the outside world a more comprehensive picture of people who work in tech, and to bring a bit of attention to folks in the industry whose stories have never been heard, considered or celebrated. The belief is that storytelling is a powerful tool for social impact and positive change.

Women-in-Astronomy-Blogger Jessica Kirkpatrick was on of the 100 "techies" profiled. Her interview discusses her experience as a woman in astrophysics, a person with a disability, a woman in tech, and a Bay Area native who has watched her home town dramatically change by the rise of Silicon Valley.

Read Jessica's full interview, and interviews of 99 other underrepresented folks at Techies Project. Helena will be tweeting highlights from the interviews and posting them on Medium for the next 100 days.  Follow the project here: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Medium.

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?”

AASWOMEN Newsletter for January 30, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of January 30, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Lessons from Women's Safety Initiatives in South Asia  
2. Negotiating a Single Tenure Track Offer 
3. AAS Council Elections
4. L’Oréal USA for Women in Science Fellowship Program 
5. Science Says Teams Work Better When They’re Mostly Women  
6. Super-Gifted Boys Choose Higher-Powered, Higher-Paying Careers Than Female Peers      
7. 100% of the women of color interviewed in STEM study experienced gender bias
8. Slowing down in academia: Is it worth the risk? I say yes.
9. Reasons You were not Promoted That are Totally Unrelated to Gender
10. Where are the women at Davos?
11. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Affirmative Action

Participants of the Northeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Penn State

I recently had the privilege of being an invited speaker at the Northeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Penn State on January 17-19. It was a three-day regional conference for undergraduates interested in physics and one of eight regional physics conferences organized by the American Physical Society. I spoke on gender issues: unconscious bias, stereotype threat, and impostor syndrome. It was a fantastic experience. The young women I met were smart, articulate, and confident. They listened attentively, laughed when appropriate, and asked insightful questions. In fact, the question time went way over and spilled well into the slot scheduled for lunch. I came away with the feeling that, if these women were any indication, then the future of physics was in good hands.

Why So Few? An Introduction

The 2010 report entitled, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) is based on interviews with top researchers and a review of the large body of academic research literature on gender and science. It presents eight separate research findings on the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate.  Each of these findings demonstrates that social and environmental factors clearly contribute to the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering.

The research findings are organized into three areas: (1) how social and environmental factors shape girls’ achievements and interest in math and science; (2) how the climate of university science and engineering departments affect women’s - both students and faculty - experience in STEM fields; and (3) the continuing role of bias in limiting women’s success in STEM in education and the workplace.