AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of July 12, 2019
eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, JoEllen McBride, and Alessandra Aloisi
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This week's issues:
1. Crosspost: Pre-registration Open for the Inclusive Astronomy 2 Conference
2. Register now to watch the first Astro2020 steering committee meeting!
3. Education Professional Development Mini-Grant Opportunity Now Open
4. Women are less supportive of space exploration – getting a woman on the Moon might change that
5. Astronaut Barbie has landed, and it’s one giant leap for women in STEM
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| ESA Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and her Barbie (stylist.co.uk image) |
6. How a decision-analysis tool helped one scientist couple make some tough career choices
7. These young scientists will shape the next 50 years of Moon research
7. These young scientists will shape the next 50 years of Moon research
8. Queer voices in palaeontology
9. How I lost my identity — and embraced a new one
10. Why Men Thought Women Weren’t Made to Vote
11. Who gets grant money? The (gendered) words decide.
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
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1. Crosspost: Pre-registration Open for the Inclusive Astronomy 2 Conference
From: JoEllen McBride via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
It has been four years since the 2015 Nashville Inclusive Astronomy meeting, an event that brought astronomers together with sociologists, policy makers, and leaders in the field to discuss issues affecting underrepresented groups in astronomy. The Nashville Recommendations, which emphasize equity and intersectionality, build upon a rich history of work to broaden participation and improve climates.
We now have the opportunity to bring together the astronomy community to discuss the current state of the profession and make recommendations for the 2020s and beyond.
Read more about the Inclusive Astronomy 2 Conference at
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2. Register now to watch the first Astro2020 steering committee meeting!
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]
The first Astro2020 steering committee meeting will take place on July 15-17, 2019 at the Keck Center in Washington, D.C. You are invited to watch the open sessions of the meeting remotely.
The open sessions will take place on:
Monday, July 15, 2019 from 10:30am to 6:00pm ET
Tuesday, July 16, 2019 from 8:30am to 3:15pm ET
Register at
Find the meeting agenda at
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3. Education Professional Development Mini-Grant Opportunity Now Open
From: Kim Coble [kcoble_at_sfsu.edu]
The AAS Education Committee invites proposals from US-based AAS members to provide education-related professional-development experiences for fellow members. Suitable venues for such experiences include (but are not limited to) AAS and Division meetings, college and university campuses, museums, planetariums, observatories, and online webinars and hangouts. The AAS-EPD mini-grant program will provide direct funding and logistical support for these experiences but will not pay any indirect costs (e.g., overhead). Individual grants will range from $1,000 to $10,000, with a typical amount of approximately $3,500 or less. The application deadline is Sunday, 4 August 2019, at 11:59 pm Eastern time.
For more information, email epd@aas.org or see the call at
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4. Women are less supportive of space exploration – getting a woman on the Moon might change that
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]
By Wendy Whitman Cobb
“From my perspective as a space policy analyst, this is an important message [to send a woman to the Moon] for NASA to send. Women have been historically excluded from the space program, especially early on. While women have made inroads both as astronauts and more generally within the NASA ranks since, there remains a significant gender gap in support for space exploration.”
Read more at
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5. Astronaut Barbie has landed, and it’s one giant leap for women in STEM
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Hollie Richardson
"It’s been 50 years since man first stepped on the moon, but it was only recently that NASA confirmed it would finally be sending a woman up there.
It was also announced in 2015 that the Mars One mission will send four women to Mars by 2024, along with one male astronaut.”
To celebrate these opportunities for women space explorers, Mattel modeled their latest version of Astronaut Barbie after real astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight of a European astronaut.
Read more at
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6. How a decision-analysis tool helped one scientist couple make some tough career choices
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com] and Jessica Mink [jmink_at_cfa.harvard.edu]
By Rachel Katz & Sean Sterrett
"When our postdocs finished, Sean was keen to stay in academia, but I wanted more of an applied ‘on the ground’ job helping to make conservation decisions (working for the government or a non-profit organization, for example). Sean was invited for academic interviews at several universities where there were few conservation-related government opportunities for me. We began feeling paralysed about the seemingly inevitable choice we would have to make: my career or his.
In 2016, I was offered a job as a biometrician at the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Massachusetts.
We used a structured decision-making (SDM) process called PrOACT (short for: frame the problem, identify objectives, explore alternatives, predict consequences, evaluate trade-offs) to help us decide whether this was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up."
Read more at
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7. These young scientists will shape the next 50 years of Moon research
From: Clive Neal [cneal_at_nd.edu]
The future looks bright!! Nature magazine has highlighted investigations of young scientists from around the world who are "shaking up lunar exploration".
Read more at
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8. Queer voices in palaeontology
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]
Riley Black came out as transgender and non-binary this year. In this article, Riley "describes the challenges of cultivating diversity in a discipline with an ‘Indiana Jones’ image", including how the "lack of inclusion, and understanding, has real consequences".
Read more at
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9. How I lost my identity — and embraced a new one
From: Nicolle Zellner [nzellner_at_albion.edu]
by Lia Paola Zambetti (University of Sydney)
"It took me months, but I finally woke up one morning knowing what I was doing in a professional world that was immeasurably broader and more diverse than the labs in which I had worked. That first move away from the bench also smoothed and facilitated my subsequent job changes and moves into different professional roles. I realized that whatever my title would be (and I’ve changed it since that first position), I was going to be a scientist forever..."
Read more at
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10. Why Men Thought Women Weren’t Made to Vote
From: JoEllen McBride [joellen.mcbride_at_gmail.com]
By Marina Loren
"William T. Sedgwick believed that no good could come of letting women vote.
“It would mean a degeneration and a degradation of human fiber which would turn back the hands of time a thousand years,” Sedgwick said in 1914. “Hence it will probably never come, for mankind will not lightly abandon at the call of a few fanatics the hard-earned achievements of the ages.”"
Read more at
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11. Who gets grant money? The (gendered) words decide.
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]
By Meredith Somers
"Blinded reviews for scientific research grants — in which all identifying information on the applicant is removed — are designed to remove gendered outcomes, among other biases.
They may not be working.
Female scientists are 16% less likely than men to get a high score on their grant proposal, and new research suggests word choice might be the reason why."
Read more at
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14. Access to Past Issues
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