AASWOMEN Newsletter for November 13, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of November 13, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, Elysse Voyer, & Heather Flewelling

This week's issues:

1. The Discovery Program Series: Psyche (PI: Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Arizona State University, Managed by JPL)

2. Astronomer to Defense R&D Technical Staff

3. On the Longest Hiking Trails, a Woman Finds Equal Footing

4. Science and sexism: In the eye of the Twitterstorm

5. There's an awful cost to getting a PhD that no one talks about

6. Argentina Has More Women in Science-But It Hasn't Fixed Sexism

7. Job Opportunities

8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

10. Access to Past Issues

Astronomer to Defense R&D Technical Staff

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Lisa Wei, an astronomer turned defense industry R&D Technical Staff.   She likes the challenges of exciting new projects, the work environment, and the ability to leave work behind evenings and weekends.  If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. 

The Discovery Program Series: Psyche (PI: Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Arizona State University, Managed by JPL)

This post is part of a series discussing the recent NASA Discovery Program mission selections for further refinement.  From the 27 proposals submitted in November of 2014, NASA has selected 5 missions for further refinement in the next year. Part 1 of the series focused on the overview of the Discovery refinement selections and an interview with the Lead Program Scientist for the Discovery Program, Dr. Michael New.  Part II will focus on the Psyche Mission (PI: Linda Elkins-Tanton, Arizona State University, Managed by JPL). 

Mission Overview: Psyche

How did the Earth’s core and the cores of the other terrestrial planets come to be? We cannot observe them directly, but there is one place in the solar system where we can find answers: The metal asteroid Psyche. Every world explored so far has a surface of ice, rock, or gas. Orbiting in the outer main belt at 3 AU, Psyche is large (240 x 185 x 145 km), dense (as high as 7,000 kg/m^3), and made almost entirely of Fe-Ni metal.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for November 06, 2015

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of November 06, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, Elysse Voyer, &
Heather Flewelling

This week's issues:

1. What a Just Response to Oppression Can Look Like

2. Why Gender Equity is Everyone's Business

3. AAS Ethics Task Force Seeks Comments & Suggestions

4. Our simple calculator lets you figure out how much having a child affects your salary

5. After a Year of Disgraceful Sexism in Science, Congresswoman Speier Calls on the American Association for the Advancement of Science to Lead the Way to a Solution

6. How to make science safer for women

7. Should Academic Conferences Have Codes of Conduct?

8. Microagression, Micro Problem? On the need for Conference “Codes of Conduct”

9. Gender bias calculator

10. Job Opportunities

11. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

What a Just Response to Oppression Can Look Like

The below guest post by Dr. Sarah Ballard has been reproduced (with permission) from Prof. John Johnson's blog: Mahalo .ne.Trash.

“What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?” – Audre Lorde

I’m writing this piece to say things women of color have already said, and better than I could have. Please read their work.

Our community has suffered a traumatic upheaval this month. I won’t attempt to link to even a representative sample of the articles, think pieces, and anti-harassment policy documents that circulated among astronomers. Trusted colleagues and friends urged folks to care for themselves. The groundswell gave rise to a “widespread ripple of PTSD (or something close to it) through women in the field,” as Lucianne Walkowicz put it. I saw other male astronomers I deeply esteem publicly grappling with feelings of complicity. Every day brought fresh distress as the extent of harassment, and the secrecy and protection of it, became apparent at every level within our academic institutions.

Colleagues had urged me to prepare, before the publication of the Buzzfeed story (both emotionally and with respect to my internet presence), for a GamerGate-like backlash.  

Why Gender Equity is Everyone's Business

I thought of starting this blog entry with a top-10  list of reasons, but it is hard to balance humor and earnestness (I'm a diversity geek, after all!), so I'll take the earnest approach. Perhaps with a dash of humor. First, the earnest:

A few weeks ago a faculty colleague at another university asked what fraction of female faculty members are supportive of Women in Science or Gender Equity groups at my university and others. My colleague was struggling with hearing from women who didn't want to associate with such groups. As a result, they are sometimes advised by men!

My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that fewer than 1/4 of women faculty (in fields where women are underrepresented) affiliate with gender equity groups. The numbers of women in astronomy and physics at MIT are too small for a meaningful estimate, so I am averaging over many other departments.

Of course, the fraction of men who affiliate with such groups is much smaller: that is one measure of gender inequity!

AAS Ethics Task Force Seeks Comments & Suggestions

This post, by Dara Norman (Chair, AAS Ethics Task Force) was originally posted by the American Astronomical Society.

Dear Colleagues:

In her President's Column on 15 October, Meg Urry addressed the need for our community to examine lessons learned and next steps following the news about Prof. Geoff Marcy. She also acknowledged that the current AAS ethics statement needs to be updated; it uses vague language and gives no guidance on procedures either to file a complaint or to follow up on one. In response to this recognition, Meg has appointed me (Dara Norman, AAS Councilor), to chair a task force whose charge is to revise the ethics statement. The other members are Jack Burns (AAS Vice-President) and Christine Jones (AAS President Elect).