Issue of December 15, 2023
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. Safety at AAS Meetings
2. 1400 Degrees event at AAS243
3. Astronomy as a Field: A Guide for Aspiring Astrophysicists
4. The Little-Known Nuns Who Mapped the Stars
5. Women who travel boost research networks at home — but only in countries with high gender equity
6. Scientists may misunderstand the gender gap in physics
7. ASTROEdUNC Conference
8. How a bullying scandal closed a historic astronomy department
9. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
11. 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.
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) organizes the largest annual astronomical conferences worldwide and has been doing so for decades. Managing large, complex gatherings of people is difficult and requires specialized expertise and experience, which is why the AAS employs multiple full-time professionals who help us hold successful conferences year in and year out. We supplement this direct support with a range of contractors, partnerships with the local meeting venues and hotels and through support from experienced AAS staff who are not directly responsible for the conferences but provide significant help and support to carry them out. Additionally, all our conference organization activities are overseen by the AAS Board of Trustees, who are the fiduciaries of the AAS as a non-profit corporation, and who delegate most responsibility for the scientific organization of the conferences to the AAS Vice Presidents.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2023/12/safety-at-aas-meetings.html
1400 Degrees is a database and community space for women and gender minorities studying and working in the fields of astronomy and physics. We are hosting a community-building and networking reception at the upcoming AAS meeting in New Orleans on Monday, January 8, 2024. This is an opportunity to connect with other women and gender minority scientists from different institutions, career stages, and scientific sub-disciplines within physics and astronomy in a casual and comfortable environment. Space is limited, so make sure to RSVP quickly!
See more at
For more details and to RSVP for the event, please visit
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1400-degrees-at-aas-2024-tickets-754190483037
A recent book was published on the arXiv. As stated there, "This book was created as part of the SIRIUS B VERGE program to orient students to astrophysics as a broad field. The 2023-2024 VERGE program and the printing of this book is funded by the Women and Girls in Astronomy Program via the International Astronomical Union's North American Regional Office of Astronomy for Development and the Heising-Simons Foundation; as a result, this document is written by women in astronomy for girls who are looking to pursue the field. However, given its universal nature, the material covered in this guide is useful for anyone interested in pursuing astrophysics professionally."
Learn more at
https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04041
By A Mighty Girl
More than a century after they mapped over 481,000 stars, four once nameless nuns were at long last recognized for their many years of hard work at advancing human understanding of the universe! Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri were recruited by the Vatican to measure and map stars as part of one of the greatest scientific undertakings of the late 19th century -- the vast international effort to map the entire night sky and create a comprehensive star atlas called the Astrographic Catalogue. Although this photo of the nuns had appeared in books about the history of astronomy, the women's names were never known until just a few years ago when Father Sabino Maffeo, a Jesuit priest who works at the Vatican Observatory, discovered their identities while organizing papers in the archive.
This grand project to map the sky first began in April 1887 when 56 scientists from 19 countries decided to use the new discipline of astrophotography to create photographic plates of the stars. Twenty observatories around the world participated in analyzing the 22,000 glass plates -- and, in many countries, while male astronomers directed the programs, women did of the labor-intensive work of processing and cataloging the stars. One of the most famous groups was the young women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward Charles Pickering -- known as the "Harvard Computers," the group included such now famous astronomers as Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Williamina Fleming. However, the vast majority of women who worked for years on the project at observatories around the world who were never recognized for their contributions to astronomy.
Read more at
By Natasha Gilbert
When female scientists from low- and middle-income countries spend time working in laboratories abroad, they help to strengthen the collaborations and networks of colleagues at their home institutions. But this boost is largest when the women come from and move to countries with strong gender equality, research shows.
Co-led by Caroline Fry, who studies entrepreneurship and innovation in emerging economies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, the study suggests that gender-equal environments help women to foster meaningful connections, possibly by providing them with support and legitimizing any leadership roles they take on.
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03932-4
Read the original article at
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2023.1683
By Amy McCaig
Fewer women pursue careers in physics than in biology, and scientists from around the world believe these differences come down to personal preferences, a study finds. The study’s researchers warn that chalking this imbalance up to merely individual choice may diminish the push for gender equality in the sciences.
Read more at
https://www.futurity.org/women-physics-career-choice-3006212-2/
Read the original study at
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gwao.13076
The New Technologies and Dangerous Ideas in Astronomy Education meeting will be taking place June 3-5, 2024 in Chapel Hill, NC. Goals include a series of hands-on workshops, creating a decadal plan for introductory astronomy education, and collaboration building.
Read more at
By Alexandra Witze
At Lund University in Sweden this week, astronomers moved out of a building that was custom-built to hold telescopes and other artefacts from their 350 years of history, and relocated to a physics building down the road. That’s because the astronomy department no longer exists, having been dissolved in the wake of a bullying scandal.
For more than three years, Lund University administrators have struggled to respond to numerous complaints that were filed against two senior astronomy professors. The university ultimately decided to assign the two professors to other departments and to disband the department of astronomy and theoretical physics, subsuming it as a division of the physics department.
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03953-z
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