AASWOMEN Newsletter for April 11, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of April 11, 2014

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

This week's issues:

1. Guest Post: Time to talk about Privilege

2. Cultural Change: Broadening the Metrics for Promotion

3. France A. Córdova Sworn In as NSF Director

4. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a Community College

5. Uwingu Invites Applications for Graduate-Student Travel Grants

6. Look past cult of perfection to promote women in sciences

7. Yes, Daily Mail – black and Asian women can be qualified to talk

8. Job Opportunities

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

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.

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a Community College

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 Andria Schwortz, an astronomer turned tenure track faculty at a Community College. 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 first and third Thursday of the month.

Cultural Change; Broadening the Metrics for Promotion

The UK's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recently released a set of recommendations for promoting "Women in Scientific Careers". The report includes numerous useful references to studies describing the range of obstacles to recruitment and retention, as well as useful references to studies providing remedies and solutions for these obstacles. 

However, many found the report 'weak', particularly in terms of failing to address the structural changes needed in academia to tackle inequality. For example, women faculty at the University of Cambridge published a letter in the Times Higher Education calling specifically for changes in how academics are assessed so that women do not face disadvantages for taking on tasks in teaching, administration and public engagement, rather than research. The letter says that a broader set of metrics should be used to evaluate performance and determine promotion.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for April 4, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of April 4, 2014
eds: Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, Nick Murphy, & Nicolle Zellner

This week's issues:

1. Negotiating While Being a Woman

2. Build a Smarter Group from Scratch: Converse Equitably, Add Women, Stir

3. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

4. Astronomy and gender politics: In space and academia, Meg Urry pushes the envelope

5. LadyParagons Interview with Jessica Kirkpatrick, Director of Data Science at InstaEDU

6. Job Opportunities

7. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

8. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

9. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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 Neil Gehrels, an astronomer turned Chief of NASA Goddard's Astroparticle Physics Laboratory. He loves his job, is very satisfied with his work-life balance, and finds his work environment to be very family friendly. 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 first and third Thursday of the month.

Build a Smarter Group from Scratch: Converse Equitably, Add Women, Stir.

The below is 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.  Follow her on twitter at: @hubbahubble

To work in astronomy is now to work in teams. A recent PNAS study reported that the average team size associated with a single publication grew from 1.5 in 1961-1965, to 6.7 in 2006-2010 (Milojević 2014). However, much of the dialog about the nature of intelligence is still focused upon single individuals. Though the conception of a person’s intelligence as a fixed quantity is fraught at best (see this summary by J. Johnson), it’s often the only way we conceive of intelligence at all. What is the nature of the intelligence of a group? What quantities are predictive of it, if any? It is now groups of individuals who publish new ideas in our field. To ask about group intelligence is now to ask: “How are units of knowledge produced?”