Reaching Parity: Lessons from the NSF AAPF

Today's guest-blogger is Eilat Glikman. Eilat holds an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University.  She studies dust reddened quasars and their role in quasar/galaxy co-evolution, as well as faint quasars at high redshifts.  

I returned from a long and stimulating American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting which began for me the weekend prior with the annual NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellows (AAPF) Symposium. Those who have attended the AAPF Symposium over the years will tell you: it is usually the highlight of the entire AAS meeting.

This year's symposium was my last and I was feeling both sentimental and grateful to have had the privilege of being connected to an incredible bunch of scientists through this fellowship. The subject of the talks ranged from exoplanet detection, general relativity theory, galaxies and AGN, as well as dark matter detection and efforts to expand astronomy education to deaf and hard-of-hearing students. A remarkable and inspiring itinerary. And as I watched and listened, it occurred to me that there seemed to be a lot of women contributors. So I counted, and then tweeted:

“According to the schedule #AAPF13 has 9 male fellow presenters and 11 females. Exceeding parity: something to be proud of!”

Guest Post: J. Rigby on "While you're fixing broken family leave policies, cover queer families."

This week's guest blogger is J. Rigby. Dr. Rigby is an Astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Deputy Operations Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. Dr. Rigby's research interests include galaxy evolution, rapidly star-forming galaxies, and the star-formation, metal-enrichment, and black hole growth histories of the universe.

The 2013 winter AAS meeting in Long Beach featured a special session about family leave policies for grad students and postdocs at every one of the 28 US institutions that grant PhDs in Astronomy.  Dave Charbonneau and Laura Trouille of CSWA have surveyed the current state of our field.

I hope the survey results motivate our community to improve our leave policies.  If I want full participation of women in science, we've got to drop these antiquated policies that assume that scientists don't ever have to take leave to adopt, birth, or otherwise care for a child. As an egregious example, at four US institutions that grant astronomy PhDs, graduate students lose their health insurance if they go on parental leave.

Let me speak to those brave academics who are motivated to take the hood off their institution's broken family leave policies, pull out the stripped gears, and suggest fairer replacements.  Good going, brave repairmen and women!   Now that you've got the the policy disassembled…  Could you add protections for queer families?  It's the same theme of furthering diversity and fairness in a historically hostile environment.  It requires you to educate yourselves, engage queer allies, and stand up not only for your own interests, but for fairness and the interests of other minority groups, toward the greater goal of diversity and equality.

Does your institution allow employees, graduate students, and post-docs to put their same-sex partner on their health insurance plan?  (Look up your university or your company.)  What about the child of a same-sex partner?  Does paid leave cover adoption and leave by a non-biological parent, or does it only cover leave for birthmothers?  These are three questions that you can ask, and improve the answers to, that have a huge impact on equality at your home institution.

A bit more on each of these.

AASWomen for February 8, 2013

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of January 11, 2013
eds. Caroline Simpson, Michele M. Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, and Nick Murphy

This week's issues:

1. Child-friendly Sabbaticals

2. [More] On the Two-Body Problem

3. African-Americans in Astronomy and Space

4. Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth

5. Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the USA

6. Barriers to STEM for Underrepresented Students

7. Advancement of Graduate Studies in Chemistry

8. Want to Host a Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics?

9. Media Training at the 2013 APS March Meeting

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

Child-friendly Sabbaticals?

I'm the kind of gal who likes to plan for the long haul. This is part of why being a postdoc was so wearing, because I could never plan more than a couple of years in advance.
Now that I have a tenure track position, I can daydream about things like getting tenure, sending my kids off to college, retiring someday... Okay, maybe not retirement quite yet.

Anyway, it occurred to me the other day, that someday I might want to go on sabbatical somewhere. But how would that work, given my family situation? Just as others have discussed both here on this blog (see also this post) and elsewhere, there are real challenges inherent in academic life that those of us with families have to face. Going on sabbatical is one of them.

On the two body problem

Figure 1: The two-body problem. Image taken from this blog

In academia there is something called the "two-body problem." The original two-body problem involves the gravitational interaction between two massive bodies, e.g. a planet orbiting a star. This is a problem in the mathematical sense, as in something interesting about the universe that we would like to figure out. This classical two-body problem has a solution, but interestingly it is in the form of a transcendental equation that can only be solved numerically. But when done so, it looks like this. Pretty nice, huh?

It turns out that there's an even more difficult two-body problem in science academia, but this one has to do with the attraction between two humans (cf Figure 1 above for a succinct description). The problem arises when one or both individuals are academics seeking post-graduate job positions. The problem, in a traditional sense of the word, is related to the fact that academia has been honed and perfected over the centuries to accommodate only a specific type of coupling. If you are an academic and in a relationship, there is a closed-form solution to the two-body problem if and only if the partner/spouse is not also an academic and has the ability/willingness to move every 2-3 years over the next six years while academic partner takes various postdocs and/or other job positions. Personally, I was fortunate to find this "solution." Most do not.

Super Bowl? Super SO!

Some of you may have noticed that the Super Bowl was yesterday. I figured we wouldn’t bother doing anything since the Packers weren’t playing. I know, right? Thus, when my SO suggested having a small get together, I wasn’t that enthused.  I had way too much to do: grade homework, prep for next week’s classes, analyze data, and attend a faculty meeting (at school, on Saturday). I had no time to shop, clean, cook… or any of the things that need to be done when hosting an event, small or otherwise. Most people work an extra day on office-related tasks, and I could not add another activity to my already-full weekend agenda.

“Don’t worry”, he said. “I’ll take care of everything!” 

AASWomen for February 1, 2013

AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy
Issue of February 1, 2013
eds. Caroline Simpson, Michele Montgomery, Daryl Haggard, and Nick Murphy

This week's issues:

1. In Praise of Remote Observing

2. Astronomy vs. Data Science

3. Women On Boards of Sci/Tech/CS Companies

4. Birgeneau Receives the 2012 Karl Taylor Compton Medal

5. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering

6. Funding Opportunities

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 of the AASWomen Newsletter