Cross-post: Researchers blast US agency’s decision not to collect LGBT+ data

By Max Kozlov for Nature

Lockers in a rainbow of colours at the
NSF Ice Core Facility in Colorado.
Credit: Jim West/Alamy (nature.com)

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided not to include a question about sexual orientation on one of its workforce surveys, setting off a social-media firestorm. More than 1,700 researchers have now signed an open letter urging the agency’s director to reconsider the decision. They argue that it is crucial to collect such information to understand the makeup of the scientific community and craft policies that lessen disparities for sexual minorities. 

The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), a subdivision of the NSF, administers several surveys regularly that provide key data about the US scientific workforce to policymakers and researchers on demographics such as sex, race and ethnicity, scientific discipline and citizenship status. The NCSES has hinted for years that it was considering adding questions about sexual orientation and gender identity to its surveys, but delays have frustrated researchers. 

The decision comes as some studies have suggested that LGBT+ people are underrepresented in the sciences and face more barriers and workplace harassment than non-LGBT+ people.

Read more here.

Related:

AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA)

Crosspost: First-ever study of LGBT+ experiences in physics reveals red flags

Written by Kim Lamke Calderón for Phys.org

University of California-San Diego Executive Vice Chancellor, Elizabeth Simmons, co-authored a comprehensive study on the experiences of LGBTQ+ identifying members of the physics community. Credit: University of California-San Diego

LGBT+ physicists often face harassment and other behaviors that make them leave the profession, according to a new study, which comes as physics as a discipline has attempted to grapple with equity and inclusion issues.

The authors found that the two biggest factors that influence a person's decision to leave physics are the overall climate of the organization they belong to and more specifically observing exclusionary behavior.

"People feel shunned, excluded, and they were continually having to readjust and twist themselves to fit into the physics community," said Ramón Barthelemy, assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah and co-lead author of the study. "LGBT+ people are inherently a part of this field. If you want physics to be a place that anyone can participate, we have to talk about these issues."

"Nearly everybody I know who is LGBT+ in physics has left, to be honest," said Tim Atherton, associate professor of physics at Tufts University and co-lead author of the study. "We're talking dozens and dozens of students and faculty. I can empathize with the experiences of the study's participants from some of my own experiences."

Read the rest of the article at: https://phys.org/news/2022-05-first-ever-lgbt-physics-reveals-red.html

AASWomen Newsletter for July 23, 2021

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of July 23, 2021
eds: Heather Flewelling, Nicolle Zellner, Maria Patterson, Alessandra Aloisi, and Jeremy Bailin

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. Be well! --eds.]

Parenting penalties graphic, from item 9
Credit: Veronica Cerri

This week's issues:

1. Crosspost: How Dragonfly will explore Saturn's 'bizarro Earth' moon, Titan

2. Announcement of Opportunity: AAS-EPD Mini-Grant Program

3. Call for NASA Keck Key Strategic Mission Support Proposals for 2022A

4. NASA investigates renaming James Webb telescope after anti-LGBT+ claims

5. Survey finds bullying and harassment systemic in astronomy and geophysics

6. Amid turmoil, Afghan female students win award at International Astronomy Competition

7. Fixing A Physics Culture Problem

8. Why science needs a new reward and recognition system

9. The parenting penalties faced by scientist mothers

10. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

11. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

12. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

AASWomen Newsletter for June 22, 2018

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of June 22, 2018
eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Cristina Thomas, Maria Patterson, and JoEllen McBride

This week's issues:

1. Cross-post: Where Women Must Defy the Odds to Become Scientists

2. Maria Mitchell at 200: a pioneering astronomer who fought for women in science

3. Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference Oct. 18-20, 2018

4. Help That Hurts Women

5. Nature’s under-representation of women

6. NASEM Discussion and Response to New Report, Sexual Harassment of Women

7. Infographic: Preventing Sexual Harassment in Academia

8. Early Career Astronomer and Astrophysicist Focus Session

9. LGBT Stem: a Great Resource #Pride2018

10. Job Opportunities

11. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

AASWomen Newsletter for May 25, 2018

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 25, 2018
eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Cristina Thomas, and Maria Patterson

This week's issues:

1. CSWA @ the AAS Meeting in Denver

2. AASWomen Seeks Editors

3. Blue plaque for Tyrone's 'forgotten' female astronomer Annie Russell Maunder

4. USPS Releases New Stamp Honoring Sally Ride, First American Woman In Space

5. Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

6. LGBT+ Inclusivity in Physics and Astronomy: A Best Practices Guide

7. Geoscience society rescinds award to top seismologist after ethics investigation

8. Job Opportunities

9. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

11. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

AASWOMEN Newsletter for April 15, 2016

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of April 15, 2016
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Elysse Voyer, & Heather Flewelling

This week's issues:

1. Sexual Harassment – Changing the System I

2. AWIS Webinar Series on Sexual Harrassment

3. APS Releases Report on LGBT Climate in Physics

4. Allies and Microaggressions

5. Seven Graphs to Make You Gasp

6. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

7. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

8. Access to Past Issues

On LGBTQ Visibility at Colloquia

Today's guest post is by Dr. Jane Rigby. Jane Rigby is an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a contributor to Astrobetter, and a member of the AAS’s Committee for Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA)).  This is one of a series of regular monthly posts from SGMA.

You know the experiment where you give first graders crayons and ask them to draw a scientist. They draw white men with beards. Given that, if we want to make STEM more inclusive, we need to change the “scientist” cartoon in peoples’ minds. On average and generalizing, my female colleagues give more public talks than my male colleagues. In part, I think this is a conscious effort on their part to make female scientists more visible to the public.

A while back, my colleague Jason Wright (at my Alma Mater, Penn State) asked me a question about visibility for LGBTQ speakers in particular, and I responded. We did not come to any conclusions, so here we hope to start a broader conversation on the topic here that could inform LGBTQ colloquium speakers and their hosts. 

The Limits of Labels, Categories, and Classifications

Today’s guest blogger is Rebecca Oppenheimer. Rebecca is Curator, Professor, and Chair of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Her optics laboratory in the Rose Center is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to dissect and analyze the light from a continuously growing population of exoplanets.

 

I am a half-Jew, white, private-schooled, astronomer from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who loves exoplanets and pizza. I am quite certain I am not unique in holding all those labels. In fact I know a few others who do. Except I am also a transgender woman.

 

Human beings have had a need, since Aristotle’s fundamental writings, to label and categorize everything. It makes it easier to discuss phenomena.

 

One might, for example, examine the contentious notion of whether Pluto is a planet. The word "planet" is so loaded that few even know what the word originally meant—a wanderer among the stars, the etymological meaning of the word from ancient Greek.

On Being a Transgender Astronomer

Today's guest post is by Jessica Mink, a positional astronomer and software developer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, who has written the commonly used software packages WCSTools and RVSAO and worked on a variety of astronomical projects over 40 years. Much of her story is told in this interview with the American Astronomical Society's Working Group on LGBTIQ Equality (WGLE). 

While I consider myself to be a woman astronomer, I have not always been one. Since I made much of my reputation with a different gender expression and remain in the field, I have to accept the fact that I am also a transgender astronomer, and as a representative of that small group, serve as an ambassador to the rest of the astronomical world.

While gradually (over 40 years!) transitioning from male to female, I have thought a lot about gender and its various facets, but when I volunteered to write a blog entry representing my gender minority for the Women in Astronomy blog, I realized that I hadn't been very systematic about it. It is likely that most readers don't have any trans* friends (that they know about), but this far into the 21st century, most thinking people are aware of our existence and might even know of one of us.

Resource Guide for Websites for Women in STEM (with an emphasis on Astronomy)

As someone who has spoken up for women within our field, people tend to come to me for advice from time to time.  One question that I have repeatedly received is “do you know of one great STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) resource for women in our field or young women looking to enter this profession?”  And every time I say "no, I know of way more than one, " then Google every website I can think of that I have found useful previously.  The person usually leaves with their head swimming full of websites, and likely forgets most of what I said within minutes (but now knows I have a strange relationship with my iPhone and Google).  So I’m going to use my blog time this month to include the many sites that I have found useful, add some others that have been suggested to me along the way, and hopefully readers will take the opportunity to chime in on the comments section of this blog to add their own useful sites.  I’ll focus on websites targeting issues for women already in the STEM field, but will highlight one site that points out several resources for younger women/girls looking to enter in to the field. So the next time someone asks this question, this blog can be easily pointed to as a starting point.

End-of-Year Bits

It's the end of the semester, and for many of us, that means grading the last homework sets and papers, writing a final exam, and calculating final grades.  However, mentoring and professional development continue, even if the calendar says it's time to take a break.

Mentoring: Now is a good time to talk to your undergraduate students about applying for summer research positions at NASA, JPL, and with various NSF REU programs around the country.  Once the semester is over, they will have all the time in the world (well, between video gaming, texting, and FBing!) to research opportunities in which they have an interest.  If you have a colleague who has funding for an undergraduate (or more), now would also be a good time to do some networking on behalf of your students.  In my experience, undergraduate students who participate in summer research programs beyond their home campus return the following fall with renewed interest and motivation and are more likely to pursue graduate study in our field(s).

Report from Special Session on Diversity at Austin AAS

The CSWA helped sponsor a Special Session entitled "Increasing Diversity in Your Department" at the 219th AAS Meeting in Austin last week. We had four terrific speakers for this session, and the CSWA will post their slides on our website soon. For now, I'll highlight some key points from their talks.

• Caroline Simpson chaired the session, and spoke about "Best Practices in Hiring: Addressing Unconscious Bias." Her talk was a recap of Abby Stewart's talk from the 2011 winter AAS Meeting on unconscious bias, but it's a message well worth repeating. The main points of Dr. Simpson's talk were that
  
  • increased diversity leads to increased excellence,
  • we all think about the world in terms of schemas that lead to unconscious biases,
  • we can fight our unconscious biases by becoming aware of them
  • and we should be sure to use objective criteria to evaluate job candidates.
  The University of Michigan ADVANCE program has a handy toolkit available for use.
• Andrew West spoke about "Tools for Recruiting a Diverse Applicant Pool," and his talk focused on recruitment of under-represented minorities (URMs). Key points from Dr. West's talk were
  
  • unfortunately, there's no magic bullet
  • fortunately, most techniques for recruiting URMs help everyone
  • the numbers of URMs earning PhDs in astronomy is really small, like <10 data-blogger-escaped-li="" data-blogger-escaped-per="" data-blogger-escaped-year="">the biggest drop off in URMs in physics and astronomy is after the first year in college
  • historically black small colleges produce 55% of the BS and BA physics degrees, so establishing relationships with those colleges is a good way to keep URMs in the pipeline
  • directly ask people to apply for jobs, and post ads broadly
  
  
• Van Dixon spoke about "Recruitment and Retenion of LGBTIQ Astronomers." In case you are wondering, LGBTIQ = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Questioning. The main points for making workplaces more friendly to LGBTIQ astronomers were
  
  • make an explicit commitment to inclusion in policies
  • be aware that benefits such as health insurance for same-sex partners are taxable, which you can offset by "grossing up" wages
  • remove discriminatory health insurance exclusions for transgendered people
  • make policies friendly to non-traditional families, like including adoption and domestic partnerships in leave benefits
  • advertise your inclusive policies
  Finally, Dr. Dixon announced and announced that a Working group on GLBTIQ Equity (WGLE) has just been formally approved by the AAS Council. Huzzah!
  
• Caty Pilachowski spoke about "Getting to Family-Friendly in Your Department." The main point of her talk was that it's one thing to have a written policy of family-friendliness, but another to have a family-friendly department culture that is supportive of work-life balance. Ways to create a culture of family-friendliness include
  
  • make families visible by recognizing family milestones, including families in department events, and setting up a department family bulletin board
  • recognize that families include kids, parents, pets, etc.
  • bring your kids and pets to work
  • offer help to others in need
  • leave visible copies of Status and Spectrum around
  Dr. Pilachowski acknowledged that cultural change is hard, and must be done incrementally, but in the end it benefits everyone.
  

All in all in was a good session. We had about 60 people in attendance, many of whom were early-career. I would have liked to see a room full of department chairs, since they are the ones who are in the best positions to make changes. I wish these sessions didn't feel so much like preaching to the choir, and the CSWA is constantly trying to come up with better ideas for bringing in a wider audience. Ideas, anyone? -Hannah