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.

 

CSWA Demographics Survey of Academic Institutions

By Sukanya Chakrabarti

Stock Photo

The Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) is conducting a demographics survey to assess the tenure and promotion rates of astronomers in primarily U.S. academic institutions, with a focus on individuals at the intersection of multiple identities. Earlier surveys by Drs. Meredith Hughes in 2013 (presentation, report), Joan Schmelz in 2003 (summarized in 2011 and 2013), Jennifer Hoffman and Meg Urry in 2003 (data, report), and a 1992 STSCI survey now provide a 30-year baseline over which we can assess possible changes in tenure and promotion rates. Motivated by the recent AAS Decadal survey and the report from the Panel on the State of the Profession and Societal Impacts, this survey also includes questions about mentoring, parental leave, and other factors that may affect tenure and promotion. The survey has been designed with input from CSWA members as well as social scientist Dr. Vicki Baker. This particular survey is focused on astronomers at academic institutions, and future surveys will also aim to assess the career trajectories of astronomers at non-academic institutions, such as national observatories. The survey has been distributed to AAS members through the AAS member list and via a chairs list to U.S. academic departments.

While there has been an improvement at the entry level in astronomy (Martinez & Chritnacht 2021) for women and people of color, improvements in the upper echelons of academia are still lacking.  Understanding the effects of parental leave on tenure and promotion is also critical to addressing the so-called “maternal-wall” problem where one sees substantial decrease in women’s participation in male-dominated STEM fields after having children (Cech & Blair-Loy 2019). Recent work has also highlighted long-term racial disparities in funding rates at the National Science Foundation (Chen et al. 2022). One may hope that the recent development of centers like the Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership at UC-Santa Cruz to support early-career faculty and scholars of color will have a positive impact on our field in addressing these disparities. While such a center to support early-career faculty is quite new, there are now several long-running successful programs to support students of color - at the Banneker Institute, and the Lamat summer program, to name a few.  

To better understand the trends in our field for women and people of color at the faculty level, it is essential that we gather demographic data across the country. To date, we have had more than 1137 respondents to our survey. Gathering data from more astronomers will enable us to develop a more statistically sound and robust picture of tenure and promotion rates for astronomers and to potentially study the impact of various societal factors on tenure and promotion.

The survey is here, and we encourage astronomers at U.S. academic institutions to take a few minutes to fill it out by December 15, 2022.

References

Cech, E. & Blair-Loy, M., 2019, “The changing career trajectories of new parents in STEM”, Proc. National Acad of Sciences, 2019, 116(10), 4182-4187.

Chen, C., et al., 2022, 10.31219/osf.io/xb57u

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Committee for the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) Strategic Plan and its Implementation: What are we doing and how can you help?

Written By: Gregory Rudnick

Background for the Strategic Plan

In 2019 the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Committee for the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) initiated a Strategic Planning process. This significant investment of time was motivated by a few factors. As we moved into the 2020s, it became apparent that the landscape of challenges and opportunities had significantly evolved in many ways from the dominant issues that were the focus of the CSWA in years past. For example, the #MeToo movement shined a harsh light on the pervasiveness of harassment in our discipline and society - long known but seldom publicized - and demanded a coordinated and forward-looking response from the astronomical community. As a committee and community we also became more aware of the ways that we had failed to treat intersectionality in our advocacy for the CSWA constituency, thus rendering valued colleagues and friends invisible and marginalized. Addressing these and other issues required data, a plan, and a set of actionable items to implement the objectives of that plan. In this blog I outline the main components of the CSWA Strategic Plan, the process by which it was created, the implementation steps that we are undertaking, and a call to action among the community to help us with our goals.

The Strategic Plan is designed to guide the long-term activities of the CSWA and to provide continuity for successive generations of CSWA members. The plan is also designed to serve as a tool that the CSWA can use to help in its decision making process surrounding new opportunities or issues. Given the limited people power that the CSWA members and its constituents can bring to bear, a plan can help us determine the most efficient use of our resources to accomplish our larger goals.

The plan was informed by a community survey issued by the CSWA in 2019. The purpose of this survey, which combined Likert-scale and free-response questions, was to guide the CSWA in its future activities and priorities. The in-depth survey was fully anonymous and had 340 responses. The results from this survey informed our writing of two white papers to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey, one which addressed Advancing the Career Development of Women in Astronomy and one which addressed Eliminating Harassment in Astronomy. The survey has also been used to construct a set of recommendations to the AAS in the form of two BAAS papers (Wexler et al. in prep), and as a resource for constructing our Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan was developed over the course of a year by a subcommittee of the CSWA, was discussed multiple times in front of the whole CSWA committee, was sent to the other AAS and Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) Diversity committees for comments, was iterated on and eventually approved by the CSWA, and was finally sent to the AAS Board of Trustees for final approval.

The Strategic Plan has four main focus areas: Harassment & Bullying, Creating Inclusive Environments for an Ethical Workplace, Professional Development, and CSWA Operations and Interactions. Each of these areas has a set of associated high-level objectives that define the main scope of work in each of these areas.

Strategic Plan Projects and Their Implementation

The “work” of the CSWA in the context of the Strategic Plan is to carry out specific projects to accomplish these objectives. These projects represent the implementation portion of our plan. Using the initial survey data and discussions within the subcommittee and CSWA, we decided on a list of example projects and on an initial prioritization of these projects. We also classified projects as requiring short-term (<1 year) or long-term (>1 year) effort. While the focus areas and objectives are viewed as static for the lifetime of the Strategic Plan, the project list is dynamic. The list of example projects is given in Table 1 of the Strategic Plan, but it has always been the intention that this list could be added to, changed, or reprioritized. These projects involve working with different groups. Pursuant to the mission of the CSWA, most involve work within the AAS, both with the Board of Trustees and with the other committees. We also have projects focused on the AAS journals as well as projects that are more inward looking and involve CSWA activities. All projects were conceived with an explicit focus on intersectionality, intentionally taking a broad and inclusive view of our constituency.

We offer a range of projects from collecting demographic information on PhD student retention to coordinating with other AAS committees, like the CSMA and SGMA, to develop cross-committee goals. I encourage you to take a look at Table 1 of the Strategic Plan itself to find more detailed information on the range and scope of projects offered by the CSWA. Naturally, there are far too many things to do for even a very active committee to address simultaneously. We prioritized the projects to both reflect our internal committee ranking and also to ensure that there was a mix of long and short-term projects as well projects in every one of our focus areas. Ultimately the projects that we are actively working on are dictated by the interest and available effort of our committee members.

These projects form a significant component of the total ongoing and planned CSWA effort and their implementation and coordination is handled within a separate CSWA subcommittee, composed of those members who are actively working on projects. This group meets monthly to update everyone on project status and to use the other members as a resource to discuss problems and brainstorm solutions. We report our progress regularly to the larger CSWA.

Assessment is a critical part of any project implementation. In some cases the assessment of a project is straightforward and we have some examples of assessments in the Strategic Plan. For other projects, however, the most useful form of assessment is only apparent once the project is started. It may also be that the development of proper assessments lies outside the realm of expertise for committee members. For this reason we therefore construct assessments once the projects gain some steam and we more appreciate the subtleties in project execution. In a shared document we keep track of all projects, the people working on them, the status of the projects, and the status of the assessment.

Synergy with the Strategic Plan of the AAS

The AAS recently made public their Strategic Plan for 2021-2026. The CSWA plan was developed prior to the AAS plan, involved a significant amount of community input, and was carried out independently from the AAS Plan. Given this independent development process, it is therefore heartening to see the significant synergy between the two. All of the goals under Strategic Priority 2: Build equitable, diverse, and inclusive (EDI) practices within the astronomical community align with objectives of our plan, as do goal 4 of Strategic Priority 3: Support astronomy education, professional development, and dissemination of astronomical science.

In addition to high-level agreement between the two plans, there is also significant overlap in the AAS Actions and CSWA Projects. For example, Actions under Staff Support, Access and Participation, and ​​Justice and equity in ethics, policies, and practices in Strategic Priority 2 of the AAS plan directly correspond to CSWA projects. There is additional overlap in CSWA projects with the AAS Strategic Priority 3 Actions Professional development for education, mentoring, and outreach and Journals and Publications.

From the standpoint of the CSWA, it is a good sign that the resources and will of the AAS is fully behind the goals of our constituents. This is already being reflected in the close work that various AAS officers are undertaking with our committees, and in the dedication of budgetary resources to the CSWA to carry out its Strategic Plan Projects.

Call for Volunteers and How You Can Help

Our ability to carry out projects and accomplish our goals is limited largely by the amount of time that CSWA members can commit. Indeed, it was always the intention that our constituency within the AAS would be solicited for help implementing projects. The CSWA serves its constituency, but is most effective when we can enlist the active participation of interested community members.

What might this effort look like? It may be that you could volunteer to help out with an existing project. Either you could assist one of the committee members who is already leading a project, or you could take up the leadership of a new project. You could even propose a new project (subject to CSWA approval) if you think it addresses one of the Strategic Plan Objectives. It is also possible that the CSWA could procure funds to support some of these activities, as we know that time is precious and that compensation is important. In other words, please don’t let resource limitations prevent you from entering a discussion with us.

If you are interested in helping out or if you have any questions, please contact me (grudnick@ku.edu).