AASWomen Newsletter for December 20, 2019

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of December 20, 2019
eds: JoEllen McBride, Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, and Alessandra Aloisi

Mileva Maric-Einstein, from item 2

This week's issues:

1. Meet Your CSWA, Kathleen Eckert

2. Casualty Of Genius: The Sacrifice Of Mileva Maric-Einstein

3. Nature's 10: Ten people who mattered in science in 2019

4. What Works to Close Gender Gaps?

5. Full Spectrum Documentary Short Film

6. Bringing community astronomy to rural Africa

7. Male Researchers More Apt Than Women to Hype Findings: Study

8. US biomedical agency has investigated hundreds claims of inappropriate conduct this year

9. There's No Winter Break From 'Publish or Perish'

10. Become a reviewer for the National Fellowship Program: Information for new reviewers

11. Biennial European Astrobiology Conference (BEACON)

12. Applied Galactic Dynamics Summer School

13. Global gender equality will take another 100 years to achieve, study finds

14. First-Year Graduate Students in Physics and Astronomy: Characteristics and Background

15. 'Miss America can be a scientist': Camille Schrier of Virginia wins after onstage chemistry experiment

16. Women Representation on Company Boards Increased From 5% In 2012 To 13% In 2018

17. Grading for STEM Equity

18. Job Opportunities

19. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

20. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

21. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

AASWomen Newsletter for November 22, 2019

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of November 22, 2019
eds: JoEllen McBride, Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, and Alessandra Aloisi

Henrietta Leavitt, from item 3

This week's issues:

1. Kick-off Post for Two-Body Problem Series

2. New Video Interview Series from the Europlanet Early Career and Diversity Committees

3. How Henrietta Swan Leavitt Helped Build a Yardstick to Measure the Universe

4. The Scientist Who First Showed Us The Double Helix: A Personal Look At Rosalind Franklin

5. Supporting Parents and Caregivers in Science, Engineering, and Medicine

6. The Long Road to Getting, and Keeping, More Women in Science

7. Navigating the 'Old Boys' Club' of Science, With a Friend

8. Why I'm not applying for promotion

9. Want more women and minorities in STEM? Address social oppression in the classroom, says new research

10. 5 Ways to Welcome Women to Computer Science

11. The mental health of PhD researchers demands urgent attention

12. Are you guilty of equity offset?

13. Job Opportunities

14. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

15. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

16. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

AASWomen Newsletter for January 25, 2019

AAS Committee on the Status of Women  

Issue of January 25, 2019

eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, JoEllen McBride, and Alessandra Aloisi (guest ed.)

Photo by Douglas Sonders

This week's issues:

1. Cross-post: Women in Planetary Science, Summary of DPS 2018 Planetary Allyship Meeting
2. CORRECTION: Making Waves: 6 Women in Hawaii with Careers in STEM Share Their Stories

3. Nancy Roman, the American space agency NASA's first Chief Astronomer

4. Typical physics Ph.D. admissions criteria limit access to underrepresented groups but fail to predict doctoral completion

5. Influenster Now Accepting 2019 Women in STEM Academic Scholarship Applications

6. Women in space: Roscosmos sets sights on creating female crew of cosmonauts, says source

7. Mind The Gap: Women Underrepresented In Awarding Of Prestigious Prizes

8. When Bankwest's female tech staff are told "girls don't hack", this is what they do...

9. Job Opportunities  

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

Rubrics and Resources for a Diverse Faculty and Graduate Student Body

The editors of the AASWomen Newsletter are receiving many ads for tenure-track faculty positions and fellowship opportunities. Thank you for sending them! 

As we enter the "hiring season", please think about using rubrics in decisions related to hiring and, in the case of graduate school, admission*. Please also consider making them transparent by publishing them so that applicants are aware of the evaluation criteria. All of us are born with biases and they play out in our lives every day, especially when considering who to add to our department, field, and/or community. Rubrics allow us to compartmentalize those factors that are most important to us and allow a standardization of the factors to be considered, among all members of the decision committee.

I've listed some resources here that may be useful to you and/or your department. Feel free to share widely!

Faculty Search Toolkit (Michigan State University)

Faculty Hiring Evaluation Rubrics (University of Michigan, via the University of Washington)

   

Checklist for Hiring (Michigan Tech)

Multiple resources, incl. a variety of rubrics and a list of best practices (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

More resources (University of Michigan)

While the above resources are focused on practices to hire a diverse faculty, the guidelines can certainly be applied to accepting graduate students and the rubrics can be revised accordingly. As far as I can tell, no one has developed any rubrics for graduate school admission, but the need is real! So, if you design one, it will be a great resource and the CSWA can help you disseminate it widely! 

A quick Google search on "rubric evaluating grad student applications" provided some promising links:

Holistic Review in Graduate Admissions (Council of Graduate Schools)

Connecting Graduate Admissions Practices with Goals: Questions to Consider (ETS and the GRE Program)

Finally, rubrics to evaluate PhD Qualifying Exams also exist. You can find one here (pdf) and here (doc).

Do you know of other resources? Let us know! and check out the CSWA's page for additional information.

* I thank my salon group at the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Symposium for the stimulating discussions that lead to this post.

The Surprising Lessons Depression Taught Me

Today's guest post is by Nicole Cabrera Salazar. Nicole is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Georgia State University. She plans to pursue a career in science communication/outreach focusing on equity in STEM. 

Back in December I opened up about taking a break from writing my dissertation to focus on my mental health. As scary as it was to walk away from research, it turned out to be the right choice for me. Here, I highlight the lessons I learned during this difficult time.

1. Depression Lies

If you’ve never experienced depression, it can be hard to understand what it feels like. The best way I can describe it is that my brain was constantly lying to me. The very things that would have helped me overcome the depression were the things my brain was telling me to avoid. I withdrew from everyone around me, even though just a short phone call with my family would have made me feel better. I stayed in my apartment for days, when a brief walk outside would have lifted my spirits. My brain also said that I would never feel better. The hardest part was gathering the energy to actively fight those lies so I could start the process of getting better.

AAS President's Column: Rethinking the Role of the GRE

This post, by Meg Urry (President of the AAS) was originally posted by the American Astronomical Society.

An Open Letter to Chairs of Departments That Grant Degrees in the Astronomical Sciences:

I am writing about an issue of concern to the American Astronomical Society (AAS), namely, graduate admissions. In January, the AAS Council will discuss and vote on whether to issue a statement on behalf of the Society (appended at the end of this letter) that makes a case for why the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and the Physics GRE (PGRE) should be optional; or, if they are used, why there should be no fixed cutoff score; and why the demographics of the applicants may need to be taken into account explicitly. I write in advance of that action because the season of graduate admissions is upon us. I hope you will read this letter and draft statement and circulate it to your graduate admissions committee. If you have any comments or concerns, I hope you will send them to me and/or council@aas.org.

Taking a Mental Health Break from My Dissertation

Today's guest post is by Nicole Cabrera Salazar. Nicole is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Georgia State University. She plans to pursue a career in science communication/outreach focusing on equity in STEM. 

About a month ago, I got sick with a simple cold. I was in the middle of writing the third chapter of my dissertation and had just taken time off to get over another cold two weeks before. I was also behind on the timeline to defend my thesis next year, and more delays didn’t seem like the best idea. So I did what any other grad student in my position would: I tried to power through.

Ten days later, my cold was still going strong. I was worried because I had been waking up with panic attacks in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, hyperventilating and shaking uncontrollably. Sick, sleep deprived, and anxious, I gave in and went to the doctor. I burst into tears as soon as she came into the room. 

Join the Party!

 

Today’s guest blogger is Brittany Kamai. Brittany is currently a Ph.D. student in physics at Vanderbilt University. Her research is on the Fermilab Holometer, an experiment designed to test whether a fundamental description of space-time has large scale measurable effects. She is a National Academy of Sciences Ford Fellow, a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Fermi National Laboratory URA Scholar and Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago Visiting Graduate Student. Brittany got her B.Sc. degree at the University of Hawaii and her M.A. at Fisk University.

 

Let's re-think this -- the academic world is a giant party! At first glance, you may not see what I mean, but here is a way I have reframed the situation to make it less intimidating. What I reference here as "the party" is the scientific world itself. It's a strange new environment that doesn’t make sense. Party goers may appear unapproachable and may even be speaking a different language. The party itself may seem daunting and overwhelming. Forget all that!

 

Invite yourself to the party!
You need to invite yourself to the party. Yes, this is a nerve racking experience because you may feel out of place and awkward. The reality is that the party is where you need to be! You are an intelligent, interesting scientist who the host maybe hasn't met yet. You may have slipped under the radar, and the organizers aren't fully aware of what you can bring to the table. In most cases, it wasn't a personal slight towards you. They just weren't paying attention and missed giving you an invitation.

Raising the Bar in Physics Graduate Education

By Meg Urry, Yale University (Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy) 

The following is adapted from a keynote address given at the APS Conference on Graduate Education in January, 2013.  

Reproduced from the June 2013 Issue of Status: A Report on Women in Astronomy

I am pleased to be addressing (and attending) this conference and I also know this audience is deeply committed to graduate education, so you probably don’t need to hear what I am going to say. Nonetheless, I thought a keynote address should be provocative, so I’ve done my best to push some buttons...

The invitation to speak tonight came shortly after the election last November. Front and center in the news was the Republican party’s concern about the shifting demographics in the United States: talking heads and columnists described the vanishing white male, the increasing diversity of the American population, and the sense that modern political parties have to adjust accordingly.

Grad School Blues

A few years back UC Berkeley did a study of the mental health of graduate students.  The results were quite astounding.

The study found that 67% of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54% felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10% said they had considered suicide (note that in the graph below shows considering suicide "frequently" or "all the time", thus the percentage difference).  Female respondents were more likely to report feeling hopeless, exhausted, sad, depressed, or suicidal. By comparison, an estimated 9.5% of American adults suffer from depressive disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.