Response #1 to arguments against affirmative action

Image credit: NPR vis Wordle

Last year presented a hypothetical scenario in which a university incentivized an astronomy department to diversify their faculty. I wrote

A top-25 astronomy department has a major gender imbalance on their faculty. Let's say the fraction of women professors is below 10% of the overall faculty (This is a safe example since we don't actually know of such a department, do we? Right? Anyone?). 

Let's suppose that the upper administrators at said hypothetical university (e.g. the Dean of Sciences) would like to address this problem with a radical approach. If the astronomy department conducts a programmatic search for a woman junior professor and identifies a candidate that meets the high bar expected of the university and department, then a special faculty line will be made available that won't count against future departmental hires.

I then solicited arguments against such an effort. I had several motivations in soliciting these arguments. First, I really want to get the lay of the land. I've heard scattered bits and pieces of arguments against affirmative action policies (e.g. "They're unfair to white men!" or "Women are getting jobs unfairly."), and I like to be prepared when discussing them. The comments I received motivated me to read up on the subject, and talk to more knowledgeable friends and experts. I also wanted to spark a community discussion on the topic, which based on the comments to my first post, on Facebook and in emails sent to me, I think I succeeded, at least amongst the people paying any sort of attention to the issue.

(Note that Joan Schmelz wrote an excellent, related piece on affirmative action yesterday). 

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.

AASWomen for March 7, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of March 7, 2014

eds: Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, Nick Murphy, & Nicolle Zellner

This week's issues:

1. Sometimes Being Good Isn’t Enough

2. Part II Nail Salons: Appropriate Astronomy Women’s Group Venue? Survey Results

3. The 2013 CSWA Demographics Survey: Portrait of a Generation of Women in Astronomy

4. Childcare Available at Boston AAS Meeting

5. Career Profile: Astronomer to Director for the Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics

6. L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Fellowships: UK and Ireland

7. How to Level the Playing Field for Women in Science

8. In Academia, Women Collaborate Less With Their Same-Sex Juniors

9. Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage

10. A Mighty Girl: Mighty Careers

11. Change sought in women's depiction in text books

12. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

14. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Director for the Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Bryan Gaensler, an astronomer turned Professor of Physics & Astronomy and Director for the Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.

Guest Post: Sometimes being good isn’t enough

Today's guest blogger is Dr. Stephen Rinehart.  Dr. Rinehart is the Associate Chief of the Laboratory for Observational Cosmology at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.  He was awarded his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1999, and came to Goddard as a post-doc in 2001, becoming a civil servant in 2004.  He is married to another astronomer, and the proud father of a 2-year old girl.

This is for all the men out there.  Ok, for the women too. 

Are you a good person?  In particular, are you a good person when it comes to supporting equitable treatment for everyone?  I like to believe that, at least since reaching adulthood, I’ve been a good person (at least in this context).  That’s not to say that I have been without fault, but I have certainly tried to be a good person.  Of course, the question is, “what does it mean to be a good person?”

Part II Nail Salons: Appropriate Astronomy Women’s Group Venue? Survey Results

Today’s guest blogger is Stella Offner. Stella is a Hubble Fellow who works on modeling the formation of low-mass stars.

 

On 11 Feb 2014,  I wrote a post reflecting on whether nail salons are an appropriate venue for a women's astronomy group outing. This issue was contentious within our group and, apparently, also within the astronomy community. The post received over 1200 views, and 131 people completed the survey. In this post, I will share the very interesting poll responses. Thanks to everyone who weighed in! First, some main takeaway points:

The 2013 CSWA Demographics Survey: Portrait of a Generation of Women in Astronomy

Meredith Hughes

The below is reproduced from the January 2014 Status: A report on Women in Astronomy.  The 2013 CSWA Demographics Survey, by A. Meredith Hughes, Wesleyan University.

As we consider how best to promote the full participation of women in astronomy, it is important to use quantitative methods to monitor progress and identify problems. Accordingly, collecting demographic data is central to the mission of the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA).  For the past 15 years, CSWA has built upon demographic data collection efforts spearheaded by a group of astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in 1992. The initial STScI survey was the first to investigate astronomy independent of physics. The CSWA's 1999 and 2004 surveys maintained a consistent methodology, and a large body of longitudinal data has resulted. To this day, the STScI/CSWA data set is unique in including not only PhD-granting astronomy departments, but also the astronomy portions of some of the large combined physics and astronomy departments (e.g., Johns Hopkins, MIT, Stony Brook) and a sampling of non-academic institutions where many PhD astronomers are employed (e.g., NRAO, NOAO, and SAO). It also differs from AAS demographics surveys in that it does not depend on membership in the AAS, which can vary substantially by academic level and institution. The results of previous surveys are presented in the proceedings of the Conference on Women in Astronomy (1992) [1] and in past issues of Status (Urry 2000 [2], Hoffman & Urry 2004 [3]).

The current survey marks a decade since the last data collection effort and two decades since the initiation of the STScI demographics survey. With a rich, 20-year-long data set – and nearly 100% participation from the institutions surveyed – we are now able to provide an overview of how the representation of women in astronomy has evolved over the last generation. We obtained the data and contact information for previous surveys from Karen Kwitter, and much of the data collection and initial analysis was conducted with the help of volunteers from the community: Julia Kamenetzky, Brian Morsony, Karly Pitman, Stephanie LaMassa, and Johanna Teske. Surveys were initially sent to department chairs in December 2012, requesting that chairs report the demographics of their department as of January 1, 2013.