AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 15, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 15, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Statement affirming respectful debate during current TMT protests

2. Diversity 101: Nine Simple Steps to a More Diverse Astronomical Community

3. The Family Friendly Faculty Retreat

4. Survey for LGBT+ Physicists and Physics Students

5. Job Opportunities

6. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

7. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

8. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

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.

The Family Friendly Faculty Retreat

Future faculty scheming how they will run their retreats.

Does your department or research group undertake an annual retreat? If so, is it family friendly?

Retreats offer the chance to break from the routines and confines of day-to-day work to gather as a group to consider the Big Questions facing an institution. In my view, an essential part of an effective retreat is that it be away from the office, and that it span at least one overnight.

I know of several physical science departments for which the "retreat" consists of a full-day meeting at their workplace. But I worry that in the temporal and physical space that houses our day-to-day work, it is all-too-easy to fall back on day-to-day thinking. The goals of the retreat is much more grand: First, we seek to build community. Second, we seek to engage in blue-sky thinking and fresh approaches aimed at tackling the Big Questions! An overnight also means meals together, and it is over meals that I have experienced the most thought provoking conversations, and the opportunity to really check-in with colleagues.

However, (overnight) + (away from office) puts a retreat on a collision course with that sacred family-work balance that we seek. I have written previously about the excellent evidence that concerns about family-work balance adversely affect the retention of women in the sciences. So, isn't the idea of a retreat inherently problematic? Perhaps not, if the families are invited!

Diversity 101: Nine Simple Steps to a More Diverse Astronomical Community

 

 

Today’s bloggers are Joan Schmelz (me!), Program Officer at NSF, Physics Professor at the University of Memphis, Chair of CSWA, and soon-to-be Deputy Director of Arecibo Observatory; Dara Norman, Research Astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Visiting Faculty Fellow at Howard University, AAS Council Member, and Alum of CSMA; and Van Dixon, Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Chair of WGLE.

 

Mentoring Women: advice from Joan Schmelz

 

Those of us that work to make the astronomy community a more diverse place can learn from the old playbook of the senior white men who mentored a generation of junior white women, say 20 years ago. Many of these men had the best of intentions; many even hoped to make the world of astronomy a better place for their own daughters to grow up in. Some used the model of the father-daughter relationship to form the basis of the interactions they would have with their female students. Sometimes it worked – support, direction, and respect are all good components that can transfer from one dynamic to the other. Sometimes it didn’t work – hugging, love, and discipline are all components that are tricky to apply to the professional environment.

 

For those of us who do have the best of intentions, how do we navigate the diverse mentoring challenges of modern day astronomy? What can we learn from the last generation who helped white women break into the field and achieve success in numbers that now approach parity? I ask myself what advice I would have given to a well-intentioned senior white man about mentoring young women in astronomy (if one had bothered to ask, that is) back when I was a junior astronomer? Here are three simple things that any potential mentor could have done:

 

1. First, do no harm.

 

Don’t tell sexist jokes. You should never make insulting or condescending remarks about women as a group. Hint: if you think it could be insulting or condescending, it probably is. If you are a professor, be careful what you say in front of your class or to your advisees. Address both your colleagues and your students with respect. Don’t propagate old-fashioned ideas like women are too emotional or not logical enough to do science. You should never entangle your professional life with your personal life by asking your students out for coffee, beer, or dinner. Don’t touch your students on the arm or shoulder. Never hug or kiss your students. This may seem obvious and, indeed, it should be. But think of how different it might have been if everyone in the astronomy community had behaved in a professional manner. Sexual harassment and sexual discrimination would never have exploded into such damaging issues!

 

AASWOMEN Newsletter for May 8, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 15, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Statement affirming respectful debate during current TMT protests

2. Diversity 101: Nine Simple Steps to a More Diverse Astronomical Community

3. The Family Friendly Faculty Retreat

4. Survey for LGBT+ Physicists and Physics Students

5. Job Opportunities

6. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

7. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

8. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Hockey or STEM?

The below is a guest post written by Dr. Jo-Anne Brown. Dr. Brown is a radio astronomer and faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, cross-appointed to Natural Sciences, at the University of Calgary. 

Earlier this week I posted a Maclean's article on my FB page about the statistics of women in STEM, particularly in Canada. The article described the exodus of women out of careers in science as “death by a thousand cuts”, and identified a number of areas, including major award recipients, where women were vastly under-represented. One comment I received from a friend (and former student) was, “If 19% of first year [engineering] students are female, and 12% [of professional engineers] are female, that's of course a problem (both the low initial enrolment and the attrition). But if 18% of the [Canadian Science and Engineering] Hall of Famers and 28% of the Canada Research Chairs are women, wouldn't this indicate over-representation based on the percentage of women in STEM? ... How do we reconcile these numbers?”

Gender Representation at a Specialized Astronomy Conference

Today's guest blogger is Kyle Willett. Kyle is a postdoc in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. He works on galaxy morphology and their relation to active black holes, particularly as part of the Galaxy Zoo project.

Members of the astronomy community have recently been tracking participation at conferences as a function of gender. This is intended to address some basic questions about behavior at conferences, such as:

• How equal are the allotments of talks among men and women?
• Are men and women asking questions of speakers at the same rate?
• Does it matter if the speaker/session chair is a man or a woman?
• Are women/men more likely to ask the first question in a session? Does this affect the gender balance of remaining questions?

In the broader sense, this is intended to measure if our collective behavior at conferences — in choosing speakers, engaging with them, and interacting with the audience — is as inclusive as it should be. If not, then hopefully the community can come up with some ideas of best practices to follow.