AASWomen Newsletter for September 13, 2024

Item 1

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of September 13, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Assessing the Demographics of Participants in AAS Press Conferences
2. Researchers with a large network of unique collaborators have longer careers, finds study
3. Discrimination or a Competitive Climate? Why Women Cannot Translate Their Better High School Grades into University Grades
4. Job Opportunities
5. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
6. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
7. Access to Past Issues

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

Assessing the Demographics of Participants in AAS Press Conferences

By Elizabeth Fenstermacher

In support of the CSWA’s Strategic Plan for the 2020s, a survey to assess the participation of community members at official AAS press conferences was conducted. In Assessing the Demographics of Participants in Press Conferences at Meetings of the American Astronomical Society (2010-2022), Grace Bagdon, Nicolle Zellner, Patricia Knezek, and the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) examined the demographics of who is invited to participate in press conferences and reported on the participants’ perceptions of the influence that participating in even just one AAS press conference has on one’s career and forward trajectory. 

A few highlights:

Figure 6 in Bagdon et al. (2021).



• 59.7% of respondents felt that participation in press conferences impacted their career in a positive way. Women were more likely than men to feel this way, and those from small academic institutions were significantly more likely to feel this way.

• Around 35% of respondents who identified as women had participated in more than one press conference while over 48% of men could say the same.

• Respondents report that the ‘Dual Anonymous’ method has been shown to increase the participation, and thus the representation, of women.

Figure 22 (left) and Figure 23 (right) in Bagdon et al. (2021).

When asked to provide feedback on the results of this research, longtime AAS Press Officer Rick Fienberg stated,

The most important sentence (in my opinion) is this one from the Recommendations section: ‘This study has…demonstrated that press conference participation is broadly representative of AAS membership and that this participation can positively impact a career.’ That alone should prompt more people to step forward to participate in press conferences.

In response to the reports findings of an overwhelming support for the ‘Dual Anonymous’ method, Rick recommended that ‘Public Information Officers’ (PIOs) at investigator institutions should also be encouraged to utilize a dual anonymous method as well, when selecting what is newsworthy. He offered the following:

...when reaching out to PIOs for recommendations, it’d be worthwhile to encourage them to do the same, i.e., to focus on the abstracts and not the authors when looking for newsworthy results to highlight. I suspect if you were to look at the people who’ve participated in multiple press conferences over the years, you’d find that they are more likely than average to have worked with a PIO. In my experience, PIOs often recommend the same people repeatedly.

Figure 9 in Bagdon et al. (2021).

See more data and read the full report here.

 

AASWomen Newsletter Sept 6, 2024

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of September 6, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, Hannah Jang-Condell, and Ferah Munshi

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Crosspost: Maggie Aderin-Pocock on diversity: 'It's hard to find an argument against it'
2. Women in Astronomy Citizen Science
3. 'She was right and they were wrong'
4. Women and Girls in Astronomy
5. Head count: statistics about women in astronomy
6. Smithsonian National Air and Space Events
7. AfAS
8. Investigating experiences of a Black woman in physics and astronomy
9. Larger teams worsen academic career prospects
10. Brooke Owens Fellowship
11. CHARA proposals
12. 245th AAS meeting call for splinter proposals
13. 2024 Physics and Astronomy Faculty Teaching Institute
14. Deadlines
15. Job Opportunities
16. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
17. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
18. Access to Past Issues

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

Crosspost: Maggie Aderin-Pocock on diversity: ‘It’s hard to find an argument against it’

By Audrey Thompson, for Nature

The space scientist and broadcaster describes how she deals with racism,
taps dyslexia’s hidden powers and
inspires disadvantaged students to pursue science careers.

Credit: Steven May/Alamy (nature.com)

Maggie Aderin-Pocock is the most famous Black female scientist in the United Kingdom. She has co-hosted the BBC’s long-running astronomy television programme The Sky at Night since 2014, and earned a BAFTA nomination (from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for her work on the children’s programme Stargazing in 2016.

She studied at Imperial College London, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1990 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1994. She has worked on many space-technology projects, notably on a number of satellites to monitor climate change and on NIRSpec, one of four scientific instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that allow it to survey extremely distant galaxies.

Over the past 20 years, Aderin-Pocock has also focused on science communication, encouraging under-represented groups to enter science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers. So far, she has given talks to more than 500,000 people globally.

Read more at

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02303-x

AASWomen Newsletter for August 30, 2024

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of August 30, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Meet the Editors of the AASWomen Newsletter
2. ‘If you can see it, you can be it’: Women in aerospace
3. In Early Science Journalism, These Women Were Writing for Their Lives
4. How I keep media interviews focused on my science, not my gender
5. Young Astronomer Wins Stellafane Youth Outreach Award
6. Conferences for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics (CU*iP) 2025 applications now online
7. Lack of women winners for million-euro science prize draws protests
8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
10. Access to Past Issues

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

Meet the Editors of the AASWomen Newsletter

Since at least 1991, the weekly AASWomen newsletter has included tidbits of information of relevance to women in science and women in astronomy in particular, as well as job postings. 

• To submit an item to the AASWomen newsletter, including replies to topics, send email to aaswomen_at_lists.aas.org. When submitting a job posting for inclusion in the newsletter, please include a one-line description and a link to the full job posting. 
  
  
• To subscribe, go to https://aas.simplelists.com/aaswlist/subscribe/ and enter your name and email address, and click Subscribe. You will be sent an email with a link to click to confirm subscription.

Contact the Editors at aaswomen_at_lists.aas.org (replacing _at_ with @).

Thank you to our past editors (more than two dozen!) for your volunteer work! Current editors are

Name: Jeremy Bailin
Institution: University of Alabama
Specialty Research Area: Galaxy Formation, Globular Clusters
Something Interesting: Former radio DJ 

Name: Sethanne Howard

Institution: US Naval Observatory/retired Chief of the Nautical Almanac Office

Specialty Research Area: galaxy dynamics

Something Interesting: painting; history of women in science with book The Hidden Giants

Name: Ferah Munshi

Institution: George Mason University

Specialty Research Area: Galaxy Formation/Evolution; Dwarf Galaxies; Cosmological Simulations

Something Interesting: I once had to carry a note through TSA stating I had a good reason for being radioactive. If we ever meet, ask me why! I also have two adorable pugs named Ivan and Charlie. 

Name: Nicolle Zellner

Institution: Albion College

Specialty Research Area: Planetary Science, Impacts, Lunar Samples

Something Interesting: I have been a dancer since I was 3 years old. I am the Advisor for the Albion College Dance Team and even performed with them during a basketball half-time!

Thanks also to Hannah Jang-Condell, who is serving a second term as an editor for AASWomen.

AASWomen Newsletter for August 23, 2024

AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy     
Issue of August 23, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

August 26, 2026 (Image: oprahdaily.com)

1. Meet Central American-Caribbean Astronomy Bridge Program Fellows - Part 9    
2. Register for the Equity in Graduate Admissions Workshops
3. Women's Equality Day, August 26 2024  
4. Gender bias might be working at level of whole disciplines  
5. How do we bring more diversity to STEM?    
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

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------