From Item 2Issue of September 30, 2022
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Alessandra Aloisi, and Sethanne Howard
[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. Be well! --eds.]
This week's issues:
1. Crosspost: The Milky Way Speaks for Itself: An Interview With Moiya McTier
2. Machine learning can accurately predict a scientist’s gender based on citation data alone
3. How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy
4. How hiring policies can help end workplace harassment
5. Leading the Way for More LGBTQ Inclusivity in STEM
6. Inclusion Plan Best Practices Workshop: Save the Date
8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.
1. Crosspost: The Milky Way Speaks for Itself: An Interview With Moiya McTier
From: Bryne Hadnott via http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
“More than a decade ago, before getting swept into the maelstrom of high school, I went through a star-gazing phase. A Girl Scout summer camp program for astronomy was followed by nights on the deck of our sailboat, staring at the sky to identify constellations and other planets in our Solar System. One summer night while out on Lake Erie, the sky was so clear that the Milky Way was a vibrant white swathe splashed across the darkness… No matter where I am in the world or in my life, the night sky is enchanting. That’s something I share with Moiya McTier, a science communicator who brings her love of folklore and astrophysics to her new book, ‘The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy’.”
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2022/09/crosspost-milky-way-speaks-for-itself.html
Back to top.2. Machine learning can accurately predict a scientist’s gender based on citation data alone
From: Alessandra Aloisi [aloisi_at_stsci.edu]
By Laura Hiscott
“Women and men have such different citation patterns that it is possible to accurately predict a scientist’s gender from such data alone. That’s the finding of a new study that investigates how men and women cite - and are cited by - their communities (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci 119 e2206070119).
Led by network scientist Kristina Lerman from the University of Southern California, the authors studied 766 members of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which included 120 women. They matched the scholars to their profiles on Microsoft Academic Graph, which contains metadata on over 150 million academic publications.
After identifying the scientists’ genders by checking pronouns on the individual’s biographies, the researchers created an “ego citation network” for each scientist…
It is well known that female scientists receive fewer citations than their male counterparts, but the new study reveals that women reciprocate a significantly higher fraction of citations than men do. A woman’s network also has more “connectedness”, suggesting that women tend to work in more closely knit research communities.
The study found as well that women have fewer peers - though these tend to be highly productive colleagues - and that women have a greater proportion of female scientists in their networks.”
Read more at
Read the article about the original study at
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2206070119
Back to top.3. How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]
By Nature
“In 1904, Nature printed a speech about eugenics by the statistician Francis Galton. One of the foremost scientists of his day, Galton defined eugenics as ‘the science which deals with all influences that improve and develop the inborn qualities of a race’. He said that ‘the aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens, causing them to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation’.
Galton’s scientifically inaccurate ideas about eugenics had a huge, damaging influence that the world is still grappling with. The idea that some groups - people of colour or poor people, for example - were inferior has fuelled irreparable discrimination and racism. Nature published several papers by Galton and other eugenicists, thus giving a platform to these views. At the time, eugenics ‘was an active area of research and considered a very legitimate one’, says Melinda Baldwin, a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, who wrote ‘Making Nature’, a 2015 history of the journal. Nature, she says, ‘helped to spread eugenic doctrine by publishing those scientists’.
Galton’s papers are part of a shameful seam running through Nature’s history. Since its founding more than 150 years ago, this journal has developed a reputation for publishing some of the world’s most important scientific discoveries. But we have also published material that contributed to bias, exclusion and discrimination in research and society. Some of our articles were offensive and harmful, a legacy we are now making an overdue effort to examine and expose. They contrast starkly with the journal’s current goal of fostering equity, diversity and inclusion.”
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03035-6
Back to top.4. How hiring policies can help end workplace harassment
From: Alessandra Aloisi [aloisi_at_stsci.edu]
By Emily Sohn
“In 2015, an assistant dean at a University of Wisconsin campus resigned following allegations that he had sexually harassed a campus employee. During the next two years, he took similar jobs at two other universities, neither of which learnt of the investigation or its findings during reference checks. He eventually resigned from the second position, which was at another of the 26 campuses of the University of Wisconsin system, after former colleagues contacted the institution about the original harassment investigation. The case and others like it have provoked media coverage when they are exposed and, at the University of Wisconsin, have led to a revamping of policies to prevent similar scenarios from playing out.”
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03040-9
Back to top.5. Leading the Way for More LGBTQ Inclusivity in STEM
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]
By Joanna Goodrich
“Arti Agrawal, who is gay, didn’t have access to LGBTQ+ support groups when growing up in India, where homosexuality was a crime until 2018. ‘The society itself was very homophobic,’ she says. ‘I had to live under the radar, and it was very difficult and quite traumatizing to live that way.’ Agrawal found solace in advocacy and support organizations in London after moving there in 2005. She went on to form her own groups and lead diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at the universities she worked for in London and Sydney. This year she started a consulting firm, where she helps businesses around the world improve their DEI programs.”
Read more at
https://spectrum.ieee.org/arti-agrawal-profile
Back to top.6. Inclusion Plan Best Practices Workshop: Save the Date
From: Patricia M. Knezek [patricia.m.knezek_at_nasa.gov] and Ruth E. Starr [ruth.e.starr_at_nasa.gov]
We are happy to announce the virtual Inclusion Plan Best Practices Workshop scheduled for November 1-2, 2022, 1-3 PM EST each day. Inclusion is one of NASA’s core values, and one of the agency’s highest priorities is moving toward an increasingly diverse and inclusive workforce that fully engages varied talents, ideas, and perspectives. Many programs within NASA’s Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) are now requiring proposers to contain an inclusion plan that outlines how the team will work against barriers to create and sustain inclusive work environments and how the team will equip members in such a way that they can go on to lead and contribute to other teams that are diverse and inclusive. As a result, in coordination with social scientists, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is hosting this Inclusion Plan Best Practices Workshop to discuss best practices to consider when creating and maintaining inclusive teams. Examples include recruitment best practices; common barriers to inclusive working environments; and understanding the distinction between inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility. The goal of this workshop is to provide proposers with some background and tools needed to be active participants in creating and maintaining inclusive work environments. This workshop is open to any member of the science community and may be of particular interest to those writing ROSES or mission proposals requiring inclusion plans. This workshop will be held in two 2-hour sessions over two days, allowing ample time for questions and discussion with the speakers and NASA personnel. Registration fees are not being collected for this meeting, but registration is required. Registration will be available through November 2.
Before the workshop, registered attendees will receive an email from Houston Meeting Info with virtual connection information.
Meeting Portal Updates: We have modified the meeting portal to follow best practices that support inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility. We encourage you to log into the meeting portal before the conference to update your profile information. From the meeting portal home page, click on Edit Profile to get started.
Read more at
https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/inclusionplan2022
Register for the event at
https://www.hou.usra.edu/meeting_portal/registration/index.cfm?mtg=inclusionplan2022
Back to top.7. Job Opportunities
For those interested in increasing excellence and diversity in their organizations, a list of resources and advice is here:
https://aas.org/comms/cswa/resources/Diversity#howtoincrease
- Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Solar Physics and Astro-informatics, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA https://physics-astro.gsu.edu/contact-us/employment/#1664385905061-a3ce057f-dc81
- Research Staff Positions in General Astronomy & Planetary Science, STScI, Baltimore, MD https://recruiting2.ultipro.com/SPA1004AURA/JobBoard/93330e50-7b3a-4ba8-94f2-6f32360aa4e1/OpportunityDetail?opportunityId=a473cf82-0a80-48ab-9f87-598d7174629e
- Scientist, Far-IR Astrophysics: Instrumentation and Detector, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA https://www.jpl.jobs/job/R3059/Far-IR-Astrophysics-Instrumentation-and-Detector-Scientist
- NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) 2023, several institutions, USA https://www.stsci.edu/stsci-research/fellowships/nasa-hubble-fellowship-program
- Brinson Prize Fellowships in Cosmology, several institutions, USA https://www.stsci.edu/stsci-research/fellowships/brinson-prize-fellowship-program
- LSSTC Catalyst Fellowship, several institutions, USA and international https://www.lsstcorporation.org/catalyst-fellowship/node/1
Back to top.8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
To submit an item to the AASWOMEN newsletter, including replies to topics, send email to aaswomen_at_lists.aas.org .
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When submitting a job posting for inclusion in the newsletter, please include a one-line description and a link to the full job posting.
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Back to top.9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
Join AAS Women List through the online portal:
To Subscribe, go to https://aas.simplelists.com and in the "Subscribe" area, add in your name, email address, select "The AASWomen Weekly Newsletter", and click subscribe. You will be sent an email with a link to click to confirm subscription.
To unsubscribe from AAS Women by email:
Go to https://aas.simplelists.com in the "My account and unsubscriptions", type your email address. You will receive an email with a link to access your account, from there you can click the unsubscribe link for this mailing list.
Back to top.10. Access to Past Issues
https://aas.org/comms/cswa/AASWOMEN
Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.
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