Gender Equality Campaigns in 2014

Have you heard of the It's On Us or HeForShe campaigns?  This year, White House and the United Nations both launched publicity campaigns aimed at encouraging men and women to support gender equality and end sexual assault.  These campaigns are being discussed on college campuses but not in the working or professional world where issues of concern often arise.  Why is this? How does one measure effectiveness of such efforts?  Are there lessons for CSWA and others?

The first reason for the lack of conversation about these campaigns may be lack of awareness.  The White House It's On Us campaign to stop sexual assault hasn't been mentioned in this blog.  The UN Women HeForShe campaign did get a brief mention in the September 26 AASWomen Newsletter along with a link to the launch address by actress Emma Watson, shown above.  But I suspect that, like me, most readers and most professionals, unless they are in an organization whose leadership has been informed and decided to participate, would have little reason to pay attention. 

The second reason may be a lack of relevance.  This seems unlikely, given the focus of these campaigns on ending sexual violence, sexual harassment, pay inequity, and discrimination in many forms.  Some may feel the campaigns are only relevant for college campuses, and indeed It's On us is directed to colleges, however partner organizations include AAUW and many companies in addition to many universities.  HeForShe deals directly with the issues of relevance to CSWA.  Both campaigns have excellent educational materials, brief and to the point.

The third reason may be discomfort with the marketing.  "It's On Us to end sexual assault" may seem off-putting to some.  HeForShe may seem divisive or patronizing to some.  I'm very interested in reader views of these issues, as many of us are trying to reach those who are not already listening, or who may feel unwelcome to participate in efforts to promote social justice and equality in matters of gender, race, and privilege.

One more reason there may be so little discussion of these campaigns is a possible lack of effectiveness.  What does effectiveness mean and how is it measured?  Both campaigns aim to increase awareness of problems, so measuring engagement aligns with their goals.  For example, the UN Women campaign measures are based on enrollment numbers (those who take the pledge) and numbers of events held or new stories produced by sponsoring organizations.  However, awareness of a problem is not the same as owning up to and solving the problem.  So the campaigns may be effective by the wrong measures.

Many of us want to increase awareness of social justice and equity problems, to do relevant work to solve the problems, to engage others with effective communication, and to know that our efforts are making a difference.  Successful change movements often start from the grass roots level, not top-down like the two campaigns discussed here.  Yet I believe it's crucial that leadership in all areas - governments, companies, universities - be committed to, and learn to be effective at, promoting equality and justice throughout their organizations.  Do large-scale campaigns help?  What about medium-scale efforts like this blog and the efforts by CSWA and similar organizations?

Reader feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Amelia Earhart: Early Pioneer in the Age of Technology

I recently ran across the Christmas card below from Amelia Earhart which got me interested in the remarkable story of this woman persevering against the pressures of her time.  Earhart spent her life pursuing her passion for flying and pushing the envelop in aviation.  Her motivation was to expand the capabilities of planes, not just of what women could do, and she had to conquer bias at every turn.

Earhart was born in 1897 and took her first plane ride at the age of 23.  She immediately became hooked and worked various odd jobs to save money for lessons with pioneering female aviator Anita Snook.  She spent every minute of her free time learning about planes and flying.  Within 3 years she had her own plane, international pilot's license (16 woman to have one) and set an altitude record (14,000 ft) for a female aviator.

In 1928, a year after Lindberg's transatlantic flight, she was asked to join a team with two men with the purpose of her becoming the first woman to cross the Atlantic.  They flew that year and she gained fame from the accomplishment.  However, she wasn't satisfied since a man did the flying and she was only a co-pilot.  She later complained that she "was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes".  That was never to happen again.

Gender Parity in NSF Astronomy Research Programs

 

During my first year as a Program Officer in NSF’s Astronomy Division, I was able to compile data on the success rates of different opportunities in the Individual Investigator Programs. As chair of CSWA, one of my top priorities was to look for gender differences.

 

The results* for Astronomy are summarized in the table. The top line is for the Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Grants (AAG), our main grant program. PIs are mainly (but not exclusively) senior and mid-career scientists. There is both good news and bad news here. The good news is that the percentage of female awards (19 +/- 2%) is equal to the percentage of females in the pool (19 +/- 1%). The bad news is that the percentage of women in astronomy at the senior and mid-career levels is still so low. The next line in the table is for Faculty Early Career Development, the CAREER program, which generally makes less than 10 awards per year. The following line is for the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships (AAPF), which currently makes 9 awards per year. Although the numbers are smaller and the uncertainties are larger, the results for both of these programs agree with those of the AAG. If we do weighted averages of all three programs, we again find that the percentage of female awards (22 +/- 2%) is equal to the percentage of females in the pool (22 +/- 1%).

Which Grad Program Will Be The First To Drop the GRE?

This year I am the chair of the admissions committee for the Harvard PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Around the country, committees such as ours are setting to work to select the incoming class. I thought it timely to share some worries I have been having about one required element of our application: the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test, and the Subject Test in Physics.

My worry stems from three considerations:

First, I worry that the GRE doesn't actually measure the thing we really care about, namely the applicant's likelihood of success at creative and demanding research in astrophysics. So far, my search for such evidence has turned up empty: I can't find a persuasive study showing that the GRE Physics or General test scores provide a key measure of future research success. Yes, the scores do correlate with performance in graduate coursework, but to be honest I don't really care about that as an end in itself. If a student working with me finds Earth2.0, I am prepared to overlook a B- in one of our survey courses. And this isn't just my opinion: When is the last time the Hubble fellowship committee asked to see your transcript?

AASWOMEN Newsletter for December 19, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of December 19, 2014
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. Cogitations on Gender at the "dot Astro" Conference

2. On Being a Transgender Astronomer

3. Results from a survey of gender and question asking among UK astronomers

4. Thinking about how girls think about themselves

5. Recognizing and Inspiring Women Scientists

6. Mass Moments: Henrietta Leavitt Buried in Cambridge

7. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

8. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

9. Access to Past Issues

Cogitations on Gender at the "dot Astro" Conference

Today's guest post is by Brooke Simmons, an astronomy postdoc at Oxford and the Henry Skynner Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College. Brooke researches the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies and is actively involved in citizen science within the Zooniverse, including Galaxy Zoo and other projects. 

Last week I was at the .Astronomy meeting at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. .Astro ("dot astro") is less a meeting about any specific science and more a meeting about being a scientist, and using the internet to do and communicate science. It's also more than that, and partly its structure is what makes it hard to define: about half of it is an unconference whose agenda is set on the fly by the participants. This choose-your-own-adventure meeting means that each .Astro is different, but it also means that a single .Astro is different for each person there. 

It was the sixth "dot astro" meeting (the first was in 2008), and it was my third time attending. It's my favorite conference in my schedule, and I spent some time this year observing the event itself and others' reactions to it. 

One of the things I was curious about was whether the expectations, experiences and reactions of first-time participants were different for different genders. Nowadays I find that a lot of my friends and colleagues have heard of .Astro, but they have wildly different ideas of what it is. I've heard "that's a meeting for astro coders, right?" and "that's a meeting about outreach, right?" from people on either side of me at the same group lunch. The answer to both questions is yes, and more. Anecdotally, I noticed a lot of conformation to gender stereotypes when talking to people about .Astro, mainly because when I've spoken to women who thought it was just for coders they've also usually followed up by saying they didn't think the meeting was for them. 

Rob Simpson, the creator and organizer of .Astro, spends a lot of time thinking about how to make .Astro a more diverse place. Last year he wrote a series of blog posts about taking steps to ensure better gender equality for .Astro 5. The steps worked pretty well, and this year he took pre-emptive action, changing the application form to decrease the barrier that makes women less likely to attend conferences "for coders" and less likely to volunteer to give a talk. 

That worked pretty well too, though there's still work to be done. The gender balance for the whole conference was 40% female, 60% male, 0% other, which continues the positive trend from last year. Although there was still a relative lack of female speakers giving longer talks, that did improve for the lightning talks. However, one of the attendees noted during an unconference session that despite this progress we were still self-separating into standard biased roles: the unconference sessions about software and development skewed male and the outreach-oriented sessions skewed female. 

On the last day of .Astro I sent out a short survey to the participants. Just over half of them answered it (thanks all!) and I found the responses very interesting. First of all, the survey responses are overwhelmingly positive across the board. All of the (anonymous) responses either explicitly state they'd like to come to .Astro again or talk positively about what they'd like to see in future meetings. 

Two of the questions on the form were "What did you think .Astro was about when you applied to attend?" and "What do you think .Astro is about now?" Both returning and first-time attendees generally changed their answers between these questions, either to describe a complete change of outlook between pre-attendance and now, or to add a few extra words to the "now" question. Nobody mentioned they had expected the meeting to be primarily about outreach, but a few people said they'd expected .Astro was about tech and programming for astronomy. A few representative responses are listed below. 

What did you think .Astro was about when you applied to attend?

• A meeting about hacking
• Learning about cool stuff people are doing at the intersection of astronomy, CS and education. Meeting cool, talented people.
• I knew it was about tech and astronomy.

What do you think .Astro is about now?

• A meeting about hacking and so much more.
• And now I know what hacking is.
• Learning about cool stuff people are doing at the intersection of astronomy, CS and education. Meeting cool, talented people. Feeling like I've had a lobotomy because these guys seem to know all this stuff I've never heard of.
• AWESOMENESS.
• I think it's about changing the field - of astronomy, but ultimately of science. I think it's about using technology, the internet specifically, to communicate, to learn, to visualize, to share science in a way previously impossible.

Each of these answer sets are from women who had never been to .Astro before. 

In a separate open comments box, 5 out of 15 women mentioned feeling like they didn't know enough code and/or wishing there was a tutorial day for learning some of the basic tools used in a lot of the hacks, like Javascript and D3. 1 man (out of 16) mentioned that a tutorial day or thread might be useful for the less confident. In a survey of 31 people total and where the sample is split into 2 parts, is 6% versus 33% in the noise, or is this saying that women and men report a different experience of .Astro? I'm casting my vote for the latter. 

It's no surprise to anyone who's paying attention that achieving gender balance in astronomy is a complex problem. .Astro is a unique conference where the organizers are very aware of how easy it is for the process of a conference to uphold gender stereotypes and have taken active steps to prevent it. Yet even though they've succeeded in achieving a gender balance of participants that's equal to or better than the balance of our field, there are still issues with encouraging women to give a talk, and women and men still self-select for more stereotypical roles. This in part means they still have different experiences of .Astro. 

One thing is clear, though: actively talking, strategizing and planning has made a dramatic difference in gender equality for this conference over the last 6 years. Given the .Astro philosophy and community, I have no doubt this active approach to diversity will continue and expand to improve .Astro's diversity among many other axes as well. 

.Astro is many things, but I think one of the underlying principles is a "yes, and" philosophy. If you're on board with that and you have ideas about how to do astronomy better, including how to make our field more welcoming to underrepresented groups of all kinds, please consider signing up for .Astro 7!

On Being a Transgender Astronomer

Today's guest post is by Jessica Mink, a positional astronomer and software developer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, who has written the commonly used software packages WCSTools and RVSAO and worked on a variety of astronomical projects over 40 years. Much of her story is told in this interview with the American Astronomical Society's Working Group on LGBTIQ Equality (WGLE). 

While I consider myself to be a woman astronomer, I have not always been one. Since I made much of my reputation with a different gender expression and remain in the field, I have to accept the fact that I am also a transgender astronomer, and as a representative of that small group, serve as an ambassador to the rest of the astronomical world.

While gradually (over 40 years!) transitioning from male to female, I have thought a lot about gender and its various facets, but when I volunteered to write a blog entry representing my gender minority for the Women in Astronomy blog, I realized that I hadn't been very systematic about it. It is likely that most readers don't have any trans* friends (that they know about), but this far into the 21st century, most thinking people are aware of our existence and might even know of one of us.