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

A personal recommendation for the AAS to collect data to determine participation of underrepresented groups

By members of the DPS Professional Culture and Climate Subcommittee

In order to determine how new policies affect the equitable participation of astronomers from all backgrounds, we propose that the AAS collect detailed demographic information on its members and use these data to understand the barriers for members of underrepresented groups. While the AAS workforce surveys do ask demographic information (Workforce Survey of 2016 US AAS Members Summary Results), they can not easily be compared to award or author information in the way a member database could. As shown below, collection of demographic data by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has enabled studies addressing gender disparities in geosciences. Furthermore, the AGU has enacted policy changes based on these findings. Collection of demographic data by AAS would enable determination of areas that are lacking in gender representation, in addition to areas that are lacking in representation with respect to persons with disabilities, underrepresented minorities, etc. This would enable AAS to implement policy changes to enable equitable participation of astronomers from all backgrounds and to test if the new policies are effective.

CSWA Success Stories and Future Challenges

Recent data on demographics and conversations with my NSF colleague, Lisa Frehill, opened my eyes to a somewhat surprising fact. Young women in astronomy (assistant professors, postdocs, students) from some racial and ethnic backgrounds (white and Asian) may have reached parity with their percentages in the US population!

 

The STATUS magazine article, the 2013 CSWA Demographics Survey, was open on my computer screen. In particular, Figure 1 shows that percentages of women at the level of assistant professor and younger are about 30% (within uncertainties). These percentages are similar to those described in the article, The 30% Benchmark: Women in Astronomy Postdocs at US Institutions. According to this article, which was based in part on data gathered by members of the Astro2010 Demographics study group,

 

-Graduate enrollment for women in US astronomy departments has risen from 25% in 1997 to 30% in 2006 (NSF-NIH Survey of Grad Students and Post-docs in S&E).
-The percentage of Astronomy PhDs earned by women in the US has increased steadily from less than 20% in 1997 to almost 30% in 2006 (NSF Survey of Earned doctorates).
-The success rate of women in both prize fellowships and individual postdocs is about 30%.
-The percentage of women faculty at stand-alone astronomy departments in 2006 was 28% at the assistant professor level.

The Gender Breakdown of the Applicant Pool for Tenure-Track Faculty Positions at a Sample of North American Research Astronomy Programs

Figure 1: Left: Histogram of the number of searches versus F/(F +M) in the total sample (black) and for the searches at NRC ranked Astronomy programs (red). For the former, the mean and median of the distribution are ≃ 0.18±0.04 and 0.19, whereas for the latter they are ≃ 0.19±0.03 and 0.20. Right: F/(F + M) versus the total number of applicants.

Today's guest blogger is Todd Thompson. Todd is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the Ohio State University. His research involves core-collapse supernovae, the birth of neutron stars, the origin of the heavy elements, gamma ray bursts, stellar and relativistic winds, and magnetars; the physics, structure, and feedback processes of starburst galaxies and active galactic nuclei; and few-body dynamics of stars and their compact objects.

 

Introduction

 

The demographics of the field of Astronomy is an active area of investigation.  Among many characteristics of the population, gender --- including gender balance, gender bias, and the gender-related component of the leaky pipeline --- have been the focus of recent work. 

 

The American Astronomical Society's Committee on the Status of Women (CSWA) published the results of a survey in 2013 that provides information on the fraction of women at each level in the astronomical workforce. For graduate students (at all levels) they report F/(F+M)=404/1155 = 0.350, while for postdoctoral researchers F/(F+M)=186/645 = 0.288, and for assistant professors F/(F+M)=57/193= 0.295. 

 

Astro-Diversity: Post #1 – The Pipeline to Astronomy Degrees

 

Dr. Lisa M. Frehill [1] is an IPA at NSF in Strategic Human Capital Planning working as an Organizational Evaluation and Assessment Researcher.  Her home institution is Energetics Technology Center in St. Charles, MD, where she has completed science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce analysis and assessment and evaluation in support of the Office of Naval Research, the DoD STEM Development Office and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  A past NSF awardee, Dr. Frehill was the PI and Program Director of the ADVANCE: Institutional Transformation program when she was an associate professor of sociology at New Mexico State University. She is an expert on diversity in STEM and on program evaluation. A forthcoming volume (co-edited with Willie Pearson, Jr. and Connie L. McNeely) titled Advancing Women in Science: An International Perspective is due winter 2015 from Springer.  In her free time, Lisa enjoys hiking, yoga, visiting family and baking.

This is the first in a series of posts about diversity in astronomy. The idea for the series emerged from conversations with Dr. Joan Schmelz, who is serving as an NSF program officer in the Division of Astronomy on loan from the University of Memphis. Joan has been involved in issues for women in astronomy and is interested in being attentive to how to more generally increase the diversity of her field. 

This first post will provide a view of the pipeline into college and bachelor’s degree attainment in both astronomy and physics, which is an important “feeder field.” Future posts will look at U.S. astronomy degrees in greater detail.  This post relies on institutionally-reported data in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) were accessed via the National Science Foundation WebCASPAR database tool. 

What does the STEM pipeline into college look like from a diversity standpoint?  The answer to this is a “glass half full/half empty.”  On the one hand, we have seen a significant narrowing of the sex gap in high school preparation in mathematics and sciences. Indeed, high school boys recently caught up with high school girls to earn an average of 7.4 credits in mathematics and science (Nord et al., 2011).  Girls (14 percent) and boys (12 percent) are equally likely to have taken a “rigorous” high school curriculum consisting of at least four years of English and mathematics (including pre-calculus or higher), and three years each of social studies, science (including biology, chemistry and physics), and foreign language.  These are important increases since 1990, when just 4 percent of girls and 5 percent of boys had taken a rigorous high school curriculum.  Science, not mathematics, continues to be a more important issue for girls.  An additional 15 percent of girls would have completed a rigorous curriculum by taking just one more science class, as compared to an additional 9 percent of boys.