Crosspost: Picture an Astronomer: Best Practices for Retaining Talent in Astrophysics

Our crosspost today is from a newly released whitepaper edited by Ava Polzin and Katherine E. Whitaker about the challenges women in astronomy face and how these might be overcome.

Cover: Illustration of Vera Rubin, based on the 1948 picture of her at the Vassar College Observatory from the Carnegie Science Vera C. Rubin Photograph Collection. The background is one of the first light images from the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory released June 2025. It is the first major observatory to be named after a woman. All art by Julie Malewicz.

Summary:

Women are consistently underrepresented in astrophysics yet are simultaneously subject to disproportionate attrition at every career stage. This disparity between demonstrated efficacy in job performance and ultimate career outcome was the primary motivation for the Picture an Astronomer series, which included both targeted public outreach to increase representation of women in astrophysics and high-level, solution-oriented discussions among professional astronomers. 

In March 2025, more than 200 astronomers came together in a hybrid-format symposium focused on the state of the field for female scientists, combining scientific exchange with discussions of policies and practices to strengthen retention of talent in the field. This white paper is the result of those discussions, offering a wide range of recommendations developed in the context of gendered attrition in astrophysics but which ultimately support a healthier climate for all scientists alike.

Excerpt from the foreword by C. Megan Urry:

One particular conversation when I was a postdoc in the 1980s clarified both the ubiquity and inaccuracy of the upside-down notion that women had it easier than men. It started with the usual statement from a male colleague that, thanks to affirmative action, I would have no difficulty advancing in the field (a claim wildly contrary to the lack of encouragement I experienced to that point). I challenged him to substantiate that view. He launched into a story about a woman hired as faculty at a top university despite her complete lack of qualifications, and despite overwhelming competition from an outstanding young man for whom the job had actually been intended. But an interfering Dean had insisted that this woman be added to the short list and then insisted that she be hired. I might have believed this story—after all, such stories were commonplace—but when I asked who the woman was and what her research area was, the storyteller didn’t know any details. 

Wait, I said, you don’t know who she is or what she does but you are sure she was unqualified? “Everyone knows this is true,” he responded. 

As scientists, we know this isn’t how evidence and scientific analysis is supposed to work. Before coming to conclusions, we seek facts and are skeptical of broad claims— you don’t just accept some story because it aligns with your beliefs. Later, I happened to meet someone who had been on the actual search committee for that position. When I recounted the story to him, he—a person who was there, who participated in the deliberations and the decision to hire this woman—told me the story was flat out wrong. 

In fact, the woman had been on the short list from the get-go and was hired because she was the strongest candidate by far. According to this first-hand account, she blew the rest of them out of the water, including the young man who was a supposed shoo-in. This jolted me into a new awareness of the realities of my profession. I began to see that women2 were judged differently than men—indeed, much more harshly—which the social science literature confirms. We were less likely to be seen as academic stars, more likely to be criticized or overlooked. At the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), created in 1981, the tenure-track staff included only one woman (Neta Bahcall) among the first 60 people hired. This was despite the fact that women received 10-20% of the PhDs in astronomy in the 1980s. I was the third woman hired onto the tenure track, after Anne Kinney. 

She and I started asking, “Why so few?”

Read the whitepaper from the "Picture an Astronomer Symposium" at arXiv: Picture an Astronomer: Best Practices for Retaining Talent in Astrophysics.

Statement affirming respectful debate during current TMT protests

This was submitted to the WiA blog by leaders on diversity issues from within the AAS community. There has also been a statement from AAS President Meg Urry.

The last few weeks have brought to a head a confrontation between Native Hawaiian protesters and the Thirty Meter Telescope project. There are varied perspectives on all sides of this issue, amongst supporters and opponents, Hawaiians and mainlanders, astronomers and the general public, and all intersections of these groups. Events associated with the protests, including some cases of violence or threats of violence, have created significant divisions within our community, divisions which have manifested themselves in heated debates and discussions both in person and over social media.

Unfortunately, recent rhetoric in our community has crossed the line into racism and hostility, with language (e.g., describing Native Hawaiian protestors as a “horde” or other people of color as “snakes”) that dehumanizes individuals who oppose the placement of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna a Wakea. This language is a painful reminder of past acts of violence perpetrated against native people and others, and only serves to inflame rather than bring about understanding and resolution. In many cases, apologies have been issued, and these have been appreciated. Still, that this language was used in the first place by highly esteemed members of our community is troubling, because the effects linger, are particularly harmful to junior researchers and students, and create an environment of hostility and exclusion.

Inclusive Astronomy 2015: Update #1

This guest post is composed by the organizers of the Inclusive Astronomy meeting.

The inaugural Inclusive Astronomy meeting is coming up in less than three months: June 17-19, 2015 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee!  This meeting is being planned in response to the reality that marginalized people face -isms and -phobias which function as barriers to their participation in astronomy.  As organizers, we are excited for this meeting and hope that it will be the first of many.  

The content of the meeting is being organized under four broad topical areas:

• Barriers to access;
• Inclusion and access to power, policy, and leadership;
• Creating inclusive climates; and
• Establishing a community of inclusive practice.  

Each broad area will contain plenary presentations, breakout sessions, and workshops.  Some of the topics to be addressed are: intersectionality between racism, ableism, cissexism/transphobia, heterosexism, and sexism; campus/workplace climate; accessibility; addressing harassment and sexual violence on campuses and in workplaces; allyship; strategies for developing bridge programs; developing the skills to influence astronomy policy; and the societal boundary conditions that impact work toward equity and inclusion in astronomy.  The plenary presenters include Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on intersectionality; Kenjus Watson on creating inclusive environments; Lydia Brown on disability justice, autistic self-advocacy, and the intersection of ableism with racism; David Helfand on why policy matters; Rachel Ivie on demographics; and a panel discussion by Ebony McGee, Casey Miller, and Richard Pitt on science identity in students, problems with the GRE, and stereotype threat.

Gender Bias in Guest Observer Programs

A recent paper on arXiv (1409.3528) by I. Neill Reid at STScI is an eye-opener.  It presents a detailed study of gender bias in HST guest observer selection.  The results are very clear: female PIs are systematically less successful in winning HST observing time than their male colleagues.

The HST review process has been carefully designed and tweaked over the years to be fair.  Conflicts of interest and competitive bias are dealt with by having proposals judged in panels that do not have members involved in those proposals.  Institutional conflicts of interest are also guarded against.  Gender bias is much harder to deal with, particularly if it is in a form of unconscious bias.  The first step in addressing any such bias is to determine if it exists and to what extent.  That is the purpose of the study.

The study covers HST Cycles 11 through 20 from 2001 to 2012.  The number of proposals submitted in those cycles was 9400 and number accepted was ~2100.  Since proposers were not required to give their gender, there was worked needed in the study to determine the gender of the PI for each proposal.  This was done by first name identification and web searches where necessary.

One of the primary results of the study is shown in the figure below.  The success rate of male PIs is seen to be higher than that of female PIs in every cycle.  The overall success rate for male PIs is 23.5% compared with 18.1% for female PIs.

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One question that obviously comes up is what the gender diversity of the Time Allocation Committee diversity was.  There was an effort made by STScI to increase the fraction of women on the panels which resulted in a factor of more than two increase from Cycle 11 to 20, from 18% to 50%.  Interestingly, this did not result in a noticeable change in female PI success rate relative to male PIs.

The paper points out that previous studies have found that "unconscious" or "implicit" bias can be a significant factor in the scientific community.   Scientists participating in peer review are instructed to be unbiased and, as whole, try hard to achieve that.  Still peer review is a subjective process with personal judgment required and unconscious factor can enter in.  This may well be the cause of the HST results. 

One result of the study is that reviewers are now made aware of the overall lower success rate of female PIs in past reviews at the pre-review briefing.  Also, unconscious bias is discussed with them.  It is not clear yet if this will cause in changes in the results.  A welcome trend is that there is an ever increasing number of proposals submitted by female PIs, from 19% in cycle 11 to 26% in cycle 21.

Large Survey Reveals Limitations for Women Scientists

I just read a 2012 Physics Today article about statistics on women scientists that was understandable and compelling.   It was great to see their numbers and be able to interpret them myself.

The PT article is called "Women in Physics:  A Tale of Limits" by Rachel Ivie and Casey Langer Tesfaye (Feb. 2012).  In 2009 and 2010, the Working Group on Women in Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics did a large international survey to determine the status of women physicists worldwide.  They surveyed 15,000 women and men physicists from 130 countries, asking questions to reveal where women may be limited in their careers.

Results are given related to career-advancing activities that respondents experience.  Examples are invited speaker at conferences, leader of a group, editor of a journal and serving on conference organizing committees.  They gave the numbers and I couldn't resist doing my own analysis.  Here is my summary plot of the ratio of women to men experiencing different activities as a function of the importance of the activity.

AASWomen for March 7, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of March 7, 2014

eds: Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, Nick Murphy, & Nicolle Zellner

This week's issues:

1. Sometimes Being Good Isn’t Enough

2. Part II Nail Salons: Appropriate Astronomy Women’s Group Venue? Survey Results

3. The 2013 CSWA Demographics Survey: Portrait of a Generation of Women in Astronomy

4. Childcare Available at Boston AAS Meeting

5. Career Profile: Astronomer to Director for the Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics

6. L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Fellowships: UK and Ireland

7. How to Level the Playing Field for Women in Science

8. In Academia, Women Collaborate Less With Their Same-Sex Juniors

9. Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage

10. A Mighty Girl: Mighty Careers

11. Change sought in women's depiction in text books

12. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

14. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

There are a lot of neat people stories in the history of science. I've recently been interested in women astronomers who made major advances but are not as well known as the big 3: Caroline Herschel, Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt. This month I am writing about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) who stuck with her convictions to make big discoveries on the nature of stars. She has a really nice autobiography called "The Dyers Hand" (published in the collection "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections") which I found in the Stanford stacks during a recent visit.

Cecilia Payne grew up in Britain and went to University of Cambridge. There, a class by Eddington inspired her to pursue astronomy. Eddington encouraged her to go to the US where there were more opportunities for women. She applied to Harvard and received a fellowship for graduate studies with Shapley.