DEIA and Education Activities at the Summer 244th AAS Meeting

By Alessandra Aloisi, Member of the CSWA

This summer’s 244th AAS meeting in Madison, Wisconsin will be held on June 9-13, 2024 jointly with the Laboratory Astrophysics Division. The meeting is promised to be jam-packed with a lot of great scientific talks, as well as opportunities for networking with colleagues and learning more about the state of our profession, equity, inclusion, education, and outreach.

The meeting showcases strong representation of women speakers in the plenary sessions, including:

• Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh) - Lives of massive galaxies through cosmic times
• Cecilia Garraffo (SAO/CfA) - AI models for astrophysics and atmospheric sciences
• Erika Kohler (NASA Goddard) - Chemical and spectral properties of exoplanetary clouds and atmospheres
• Judith Lean (Lab. for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder) - Variations in the Sun’s radiative output and effects of this variability on Earth 
• Kerstin Perez (Columbia University) - Detection of high-energy cosmic particles as evidence of dark matter interactions
• Noemi Pinilla-Alonso (Florida Space Institute) - Surface compositions of minor bodies to understand formation and evolution of the solar system
• Teznie Pugh (University of Texas Austin) & Aparna Venkatesan (University of San Francisco) - Protection of the dark skies and the space environment

First Timer’s and Opening Receptions are on Sunday, June 9. Astronomy educators and undergraduate student receptions are on Monday, June 10.  We strongly encourage you to participate in other sessions sponsored by the AAS’s committees working with the AAS Board of Trustees to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in Astronomy. These events include the following:

Monday:

• 2 pm – 12:30 pm CT: Exhibition Theater Session AAS Committee on Employment
• 7 pm – 8:30 pm CT: Splinter Session Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities (SGMA) Meet and Greet for LGBTIA Members and Students

Tuesday:

• 1 pm – 1:30 pm CT: Exhibitor Theater Session Q&A with the AAS Education Committee

There are a lot of additional opportunities to learn more about the state of the profession, education, outreach, and diversity activities at this AAS meeting, including:

Sunday:

• 9 am – 5 pm CT: Workshop Designing, Implementing, and Refining Equitable Evaluation Rubrics

Monday:

• 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm CT: iPoster Session Community and Profession

Tuesday:

• 9 am – 10 am CT: iPoster Session Astronomy Education and Multicultural Outreach
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Splinter Session Early Career Opportunities to Learn Science Mission Design
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Special Session NASA’s SMD Bridge Program: Funding Faculty and Students at Under-resourced Emerging Research Institutions
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Community Based Astronomy around the World: Case Studies and Discussion
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Splinter Session Academic Portfolio Review and Astronomy: Potential Impacts to the Future of Astronomy and STEM Education
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Oral Session Outreach and Education
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Starting Inward: DEIA’s Essential Role in Healthy Community Models of Astronomy

Wednesday:

• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Special Session Towards Equity in the Classroom: Implementing Progressive Pedagogical Practices
• 10 am – 10:30 am CT: Exhibitor Theater Presentation Broadening Participation at the National Science Foundation
• 12:30 pm – 1 pm CT: Exhibitor Theater Presentation Life in Hawai’i: Outreach, Education, and the Community Engagement Efforts of the Maunakea Observatories
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Designing Community Engagement Programs from a Mutuality Worldview

The full block schedule can be found here. And please feel free to stop by and say hi in-person if you attend one of our events, or tag and tweet us.

Parental Leave Wiki on AstroBetter

This week's guest blogger is Nick Murphy. Nick Murphy is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research is on solar physics, including the role of magnetic reconnection in solar eruptions. He is active in several community groups in the Boston area that are working for gender equity and racial justice. 

Last year, our colleagues at AstroBetter provided wiki space to catalog parental leave policies at astronomical institutions: 

http://www.astrobetter.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Leave+Policies

The goals of this wiki are: (1) to allow astronomers at different career stages to easily compare parental leave policies, and (2) to encourage institutions to enact better parental leave policies by showing how they compare with peer institutions.  

At this point there are postings for 23 institutions and fellowships in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. We encourage you to post information about your own institution if it is not included.  If your institution lacks a comprehensive parental leave policy or only has unpaid leave, it is important to post anyway so that prospective graduate students and employees know this and the administation can be encouraged to implement something better.  If your institution has a parental leave policy worth being proud of, post so that more people want to go there!  

We especially encourage institutions outside of the US to be included, in part to show how the US measures up internationally.  With your help, we can make this an even better resource for the members of our community who are applying to graduate school, postdocs, and permanent positions.

To read more about parental leave, see previous blog posts on the upcoming winter AAS CSWA Special Session on paid parental leave policies for grad students and postdocs in the U.S., a petition for improved parental leave policies, the CSWA response to the NSF Career-Life Initiative, and how US parental leave policies compare internationally.

Posted by L. Trouille

Paid Parental Leave for Graduate Students

For my first post to the Women in Astronomy Blog, I would like to describe some activities that the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy is undertaking with regard to parental leave policies for graduate students.

When I joined the CSWA last year, I jumped at the chance to move this issue forward. Of course the entire topic of paid parental leave for employees in the US is enormous and perhaps baffling to our colleagues in any of the 178 other countries that have national laws guaranteeing some form of paid leave for new mothers (50 of these also guarantee paid leave for new fathers). While the US Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 does mandate up to 12 weeks of (potentially unpaid) leave for workers, many students are not considered employees and hence it isn't even clear if the FMLA applies. And besides, one might ask, aren't leave policies at a University the purview of the upper administration (in discussion with the various funding agencies), and thus the desires of the relatively small pool of astronomers students a modest consideration?

Well, I would like to make the case that there is good reason to think that we are going to see some rather interesting developments on this question over the next few years.  At the start of 2012, I mailed a letter to the chair of each of the 28 departments of astronomy and/or astrophysics that offer the degree of PhD, asking for the details of their parental leave and childcare policies for graduate student parents.  And, I was delighted when fully 100% of these recipients sent me a reply! My first pass at the data indicates that we are in a time of rapid change and the current policies vary tremendously between institutions: A number of universities have recently adopted a paid leave policy for all graduate student parents, while others offer no paid leave but do allow students to retain benefits such as health care and students housing; some do not even have an official policy. I also learned that solutions needn't be University wide: The Department of Astronomy at the University Wisconsin Madison has recently implemented a paid family and medical leave policy that is entirely home grown. Way to go Badgers!

My own university could surely do much better, and I point you to the excellent article by two former Harvard graduate students of astronomy, Sarah Ballard (now a Sagan fellow at the University of Washington) and Gurtina Besla (now a Hubble fellow at Columbia University), which was definitely an inspiration to me on this topic both here at Harvard and nationwide.

I do think we need to shift this discussion from one in which the students and postdocs advocate for their own needs to one in which senior faculty, department chairs, and deans advocate on their behalf. With that in mind, Laura Trouille (CIERA fellow at Northwestern University) and I will host a Special Session on Family Leave Policies and Childcare for Graduate Students and Postdocs at the upcoming AAS meeting in Long Beach (this blog post addresses only graduate student leave, but the special session will include leave for postdocs).  The speakers will include AAS President David Helfand, Ed Ajhar (Program Director for the the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral fellowships, as well as the Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology Research Grants), Chas Beichman (Executive Director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and director of the Sagan fellowships program), as well as Natalie Gosnell (graduate student) and Bob Mathieu (Department chair) from the University Wisconsin (who will tell us how they put their plan into action). I will also present the results from my national survey. The session will be Monday, January 7th from 2:00-3:30pm.

While I hope that many graduate students and postdocs will attend, it is essential that the more senior individuals who are in a position to change policy at their respective institutions participate as well.  So, if you are such a person, please consider attending. If you are a student or postdoc, might I suggest you ask your department chair to identify the faculty member who will represent your department? The goal will be both to inform about current practices, and to discuss specific means by which departments and funding agencies can adopt more supportive policies.

I hope to see you in Long Beach!

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