The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy is compiling interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.
To access our previous Career Profiles, please go to http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/search/label/career%20profiles
Gathering of African American women physicists; Credit: Jami Valentine Miller2. Meet Your CSWA, Tiffany Wolbrecht
3. Astro2020 Panel on the State of the Profession and Societal Impacts
4. Sign-Up for AAS Congressional Visits Day (CVD) 2020!
5. Call for Volunteers: 2020 Astronomy Olympiad
6. Call for Mentors: Central American - Caribbean astro program
7. Pre-proposal teleconference: NASA Fellowship Activity 2020
8. LSST named Vera C. Rubin Observatory
9. Am I The Only Black Trans Woman In Physics
10. All-Female Crew Sets Off for Historic 'Mars' Mission
11. Gender pay gap identified at some US science agencies
12. NASA set for two more all-female spacewalks on the ISS in January
13. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
14. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
Tiffany is the Planetarium Lecturer at Youngstown State University’s Ward Beecher Planetarium where she coordinates and leads programming. In 2018, Tiffany was selected for the Astronomy in Chile Educator’s Ambassadors Program, or ACEAP, and traveled to Chile touring NSF-supported astronomy facilities and receiving extensive training about the observatories and their telescopes, instruments, science, and data. Tiffany currently serves on the leadership team for an NSF-funded project developing a planetarium show about astronomy in Chile along with web-based and hands-on resources.
Hurricane Katrina hit my hometown just a couple of weeks into the school year when I happened to be taking my first astronomy class. The power remained off in my neighborhood for over a month and I spent many of those nights on the hood of my car gazing up at an unpolluted night sky, counting meteors and marveling at the bright Milky Way stretching over my front yard. I used a flashlight (no it wasn’t red; I knew nothing!) to study the sky chart on the back cover of my astronomy textbook and found constellations, stars, and Messier objects. While that was a very difficult time for my family and community, I also remember it as a time I found solace in exploring the night sky.
Gathering of African American women physicists; Credit: Jami Valentine Miller
There have been fewer than 100 PhDs in physics granted to African-American women as tracked by the AAWIP. Such depressing statistics require that physics and astronomy communities work to understand and change systemic barriers to African Americans succeeding in these fields. The National Task Force to Elevate African American representation in Undergraduate Physics & Astronomy (TEAM-UP) is working towards this goal and below we cross-post their January 5th press release made at the American Astronomical Society meeting.
WASHINGTON, January 5, 2020 -- Due to long-term and systemic issues leading to the consistent exclusion of African Americans in physics and astronomy, a task force is recommending sweeping changes and calling for awareness into the number and experiences of African American students studying the fields.
The National Task Force to Elevate African American representation in Undergraduate Physics & Astronomy, known as TEAM-UP, was chartered and funded by the American Institute of Physics to examine the persistent underrepresentation of African Americans in physics and astronomy in the U.S.
Report Summary Download https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/files/teamup-preview.pdf Full Summary Download https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/files/teamup-full-report.pdfIn its report, “The Time Is Now: Systemic Changes to Increase African Americans with Bachelor’s Degrees in Physics and Astronomy,” the task force discusses the five factors it discovered as responsible for the success or failure of African American students in physics and astronomy: belonging, physics identity, academic support, personal support, and leadership and structures. The report was released on Jan. 5 at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Read more at:
https://www.aip.org/news/2020/team-up-report.1. CSWA Activities at the AAS Meeting (2020)
3. A Lack of Women in Amateur Astronomy in the US
4. Space Astronomy Summer Program - 2020
5. US astronaut sets record for longest spaceflight by a woman
6. This drone will fly on one of Saturn’s moons. Here’s the woman leading the mission
7. Bringing New Voices into the Sciences
8. How one astronomer hears the Universe
9. Unprofessional peer reviews disproportionately harm underrepresented groups in STEM
10. I Don’t Care That Miss America Is a Scientist!
11. Meet Annie Jump Cannon, who cataloged and ranked over 300,000 stars by their hotness
12. Not surprisingly, science still has a huge racism and sexism problem
13. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
14. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
I have been an amateur astronomer for 19 years and a member of five different astronomy clubs throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in California during this time. I also get to work in the arena of public astronomy and do a lot of education and outreach. For these almost 20 years I’ve been hearing the amateur astronomers say amongst themselves “we need to diversify, we need younger people, we need people of color.” And for 19 years it hasn’t changed much from what I am seeing. While there has definitely been an increase in women in professional astronomy, it’s still nothing close to 50-50 and over the last four or five years, there has been a lot of news about sexual harassment in the field. While I don’t know if this is a significant part of the problem in the world of amateur astronomy, there are certainly many subtle and not-so-subtle issues that contribute to this lack of diversity.
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| Image Credit: Karen's Cake Toppers |
