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.
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.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2024/08/meet-editors-of-aaswomen-newsletter.html
by KC Rawley
The goal of getting more underrepresented groups interested in STEM is admirable, but not simple.
Some believe you need to catch children’s interest early, especially girls. A 2017 survey of 11,500 European girls, commissioned by Microsoft, puts 15-years old as the age when girls stop being interested in STEM subjects.
“Why Europe’s girls aren’t studying STEM,” points out that female children become interested in math and science around age 11, so there is only a four-year window to spark their curiosity and illustrate how they might fit into an ever-increasing technological work force.
Read more at
https://www.aerotechnews.com/blog/2024/08/22/if-you-can-see-it-you-can-be-it-women-in-aerospace/
By Deborah Unger, Sophie Mcnulty, Katie Hafner & The Lost Women of Science Initiative
Beginning in the 1920s, when newspapers and magazines started to showcase more stories about science, many early science journalists were women, working alongside their male colleagues despite less pay and outright misogyny. They were often single or divorced and “writing for their lives,” as independent historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette explains in her book of the same title and our episode. From Emma Reh, who traveled to Mexico to get a divorce and ended up trekking to archaeological digs on horseback, to Jane Stafford, who took on taboo topics such as sex and sexually transmitted diseases, they started a tradition of explaining science to nonscientists, accurately and with flair.
Read more and listen to the podcast at
By Johanna Irrgeher
My heart sank when I picked up the freshly printed magazine and saw the title of an article featuring me: “Climbing the Ladder in Science is Harder for Women.” I had recently taken up a researcher position leading my own group in Austria, my country of origin, after several postdoc positions abroad. I had thought the article would focus on my research and what I planned to do in my new position, as I had emphasized those things in the interview. However, when the journalist asked me what it was like to be a woman in STEM, the conversation took a brief detour. I had no idea that in the resulting story, my hard-earned achievements would be overshadowed by my gender.
I have always cherished the opportunity to share my chemistry work with the public. Media interviews can be a fantastic platform for disseminating research and sparking interest in science. But my journey has also taught me an invaluable skill: keeping interviews from veering off course.
Read more at
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-i-keep-media-interviews-focused-my-science-not-my-gender
By Diana Hannikainen
If you ask most anybody at Stellafane — or any star party, for that matter — when they became interested in astronomy, they’ll likely tell you that it was at a fairly young age, usually around 10 or 12 or so.
Not so for Kaitlynn Goulette, of Westfield, Massachusetts. Before she even started kindergarten, her mother would take her to the Springfield Science Museum — every day during the summer. Her favorite thing to do there was attend the planetarium shows. During those visits, Goulette learned about the Springfield Stars, the local astronomy club, and joined. She was so incredibly interested in astronomy that her parents bought her a telescope for her birthday.
That would be her sixth birthday.
Read more at
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/young-astronomer-wins-stellafane-youth-outreach-award/
Attend the conferences: Applications to attend the Conferences for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics will be open August 26, 2024, through October 23, 2024, 5:00 p.m. ET.
Benefits to attending: Find mentors, explore education and career opportunities, and network with and learn from fellow students who are women, gender-diverse individuals, and underrepresented identities in physics.
Read more at
https://www.aps.org/events/2025/undergraduate-women-gender-minority-conferences
By Meredith Wadman
Critics says the new Frontiers Planet Prize for research to keep Earth habitable perpetuates old inequities.
At a June ceremony in the scenic Swiss village of Villars, three scientists each collected a huge new prize: 1 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million) to invest in their research to safeguard the planet against various environmental tipping points. The prizes were courtesy of the Frontiers Research Foundation (FRF), the nonprofit parent of the big open-access publisher. Younger women scientists who co-authored winning papers accompanied their colleagues onto the stage, smiling uncomfortably: All the winners of this year’s Frontiers Planet Prize (FPP), with a cash award bigger than the Nobel Prize, were men, just as they were last year.
The scene was the culmination of an award process that magnifies inequities in planetary boundaries science and in the scientific career structure, five finalists who spoke to Science say.
Read more at
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