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